“I have a competition in me. I do not wish to see anyone else
succeed,” confides Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) in a moment of
rare candor. “I hate most people.” This is Plainview’s secret, which
emerges slowly from his veneer of confident sophistication until it
becomes a misanthropic force too large for any man to harness.
Plainview’s greed and loathing is at the heart of There Will Be
Blood, Paul Thomas Anderson’s new film of astounding depth,
intensity, and brutality. Based loosely on Upton Sinclair’s 1927 novel
Oil!, There Will Be Blood finds Anderson with a refined
vision and cinematic maturity that not even his best films could have
prepared us for.
The story begins in 1898, with 15 dialogue-free minutes of Plainview
drilling for oil with little more than a pickaxe and bucket. His crude
operation grows, and after one of his workers is killed on the job,
Plainview raises the man’s infant as his own, grooming him as an
heir.
The father and son team take no prisoners in their pursuit of
fortune, but are unprepared for the brimstone resistance of Eli (Paul
Dano), a deeply Pentecostal young man whose plaintive skin enshrouds a
fiery, conflicted soul. Their conflict of power and piousness—or
more accurately, their shared perceptions of the other as manipulative
conmen—unleashes Plainview’s wellspring of hatred, which commands
his life until the end.
There Will Be Blood is unrivaled in its scenes of wrenching
intensity, bottomless anger, and stark physicality, and Day-Lewis
demonstrates once again why he’s one of the most respected actors
(sporadically) working today. Although the dueling themes of oil,
money, and evangelism lend themselves to ham-fisted allegories about
our presidential administration, Anderson avoids this obvious route,
instead creating something more timeless and literary. And by steering
clear of narrative gimmickry or stylistic flashiness, Anderson has
crafted one of the most compelling tales of emotional complexity in
years. The film’s title warns us of bloodshed, but little can prepare
us for all that entails: the blood of violent aggression, of family
lines, of a sacrificial prophet, and of the earth, which here bleeds
oil like a biblical lamb.