At the Movies

"There Will Be Blood"

There Will Be Blood ****

With There Will Be Blood, Paul Thomas Anderson has cemented himself as America’s greatest living filmmaker. At a mere 37-years-old, he has written and directed two film giants in Magnolia and There Will Blood. Add to that such near-masterworks as Hard Eight, Boogie Nights, and Punch-Drunk Love, and you have the makings of a legendary career.

Loosely based upon the classic Upton Sinclair muckraking novel Oil!, There Will Be Blood seems, at least on the surface, to be starkly different from Anderson’s earlier works. For one thing, it has a relatively miniscule cast in comparison with the director’s earlier, Altmanesque ensembles. For another, the film is firmly set in the early twentieth century as opposed to Anderson’s other, decidedly contemporary screenplays.

Yet at its heart, Anderson’s storyline for There Will Be Blood considers the director’s most enduring theme: his ongoing critique of the fragmentation of American families and our attendant loss of core values—a state of being that, if kept unchecked, leaves us crippled in the face of life’s trials and tribulations. In Anderson’s world, only the sustenance afforded by human relationships can sate the weary soul. Without it, we inevitably descend into madness.

In There Will Be Blood, that weary soul is Daniel Plainview. It is safe to say that no single character embodies Anderson’s thematic intentions quite like Daniel Day-Lewis’s performance as Plainview. His unquenchable ambition dominates the screen at nearly every turn—whether he’s lying crumpled at the bottom of a mineshaft, covered from head to toe in oil’s black gold, or coasting blankly in the California surf. It is, quite simply, a performance for the ages.

In spite of the film’s considerable length, There Will Be Blood is a remarkably wordless epic. Anderson is content to tell his story through a series of well-crafted images as Plainview slowly but surely builds his empire from the ground up.

Plainview’s obsession with achieving wealth and power at any cost is palpable. When the opportunity to flummox a California Bible church out of its oil-rich lands presents itself, Plainview wastes little time in ingratiating himself with the congregation. Led by a fire-and-brimstone preacher in the mercurial Eli Sunday (Paul Dano), the church and its good country people seem like easy pickings for Plainview, who sees Sunday’s evangelism, like his own work as an oil speculator, as yet another one of life’s many con games.
 
As Plainview dreams of outfoxing his rivals and building a vast pipeline to the sea, his yen for supremacy threatens to overwhelm virtually every aspect of his life. His greed and ambition boil up from within him like a disease—or an excoriation: “I have a competition in me,” Plainview confesses. “I want no one else to succeed. I hate most people.”

As with the threads of communal dysfunction that brought the operatic Magnolia to its resounding conclusion, There Will Be Blood offers a lacerating critique of the ways we live now. In its most confounding moments, it dares us to ponder the most disturbing aspects of our greed, our obsessions, and our humanity. Can there even be enough wealth and power to satisfy our most secret, untapped desires? Would we even know?