A sprawling epic of family, faith, power and oil, THERE WILL BE BLOOD is set on the incendiary frontier of California’s turn-of-the-century petroleum boom. The story chronicles the life and times of one Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis), who transforms himself from a down-and-out silver miner raising a son on his own into a self-made oil tycoon
Runtime 2 hours 39 minutes
Release year 2008
Movie studio Paramount
MPAA Rating Rated R for some violence.
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
Unmistakably a shot at greatness, Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood succeeds in wild, explosive ways. The film digs into nothing less than the sources of peculiarly American kinds of ambition, corruption, and industry--and makes exhilarating cinema from it all. Although inspired by Upton Sinclair's 1927 novel Oil!, Anderson has crafted his own take on the material, focusing on a black-eyed, self-made oilman named Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis), whose voracious appetite for oil turns him into a California tycoon in the early years of the 20th century. The early reels are a mesmerizing look at the getting of oil from the ground, an intensely physical process that later broadens into Plainview's equally indomitable urge to control land and power. Curious, diverting episodes accumulate during Plainview's rise: a mighty derrick fire (a bravura opportunity that Anderson, with the aid of cinematographer Robert Elswit, does not fail to meet), a visit from a long-lost brother (Kevin J. O'Connor), the ongoing involvement of Plainview's poker-faced adoptive son (Dillon Freasier). As the film progresses, it gravitates toward Plainview's rivalry with the local representative of God, a preacher named Eli Sunday (brimstone-spitting Paul Dano); religion and capitalism are thus presented not so much as opposing forces but as two sides of the same coin. And the worm in the apple here is less man's greed than his vanity. Anderson's offbeat take on all this--exemplified by the astonishing musical score by Jonny Greenwood--occasionally threatens to break the film apart, but even when it founders, it excites. As for Daniel Day-Lewis, his performance is Olivier-like in its grand scope and its attention to details of behavior; Plainview speaks in the rum-rich voice of John Huston, and squints with the wariness of Walter Huston. It's a fearsome performance, and the engine behind the film's relentless power. --Robert Horton
Customer Reviews
Blood on the tycoon's hands
Although it's pretty much a given that there is violence in this film, "There Will Be Blood" actually starts off pretty innocently. Yet, the entire film eventually skyrockets into extremely emotional performances, with a crazy ending that is brilliant as well.
"There Will Be Blood" is set in the early 1900s, with Daniel Plainview, a prospector who hits paydirt with his first oil platform. Soon enough, he builds an oil derrick, and eventually builds a strong company. After one of his workers dies, he adopts the man's son.
Daniel becomes a big oil tycoon, and begins to build up an empire with the help of a man named Paul Sunday. Paul informs him of the oil below the surface of Signal Hill, California. Daniel builds a stable oil company, after paying Paul's brother, Eli, for his church.
Then things go wrong. Daniel's son, H.W., is left deaf after an oil derrick explosion. Daniel also meets a strange man who says that he is Daniel's brother. And, of course, Eli keeps asking for more money. And where is H.W's mother?
There are many strange conspiracies left unsaid in the artsy film "There Will Be Blood." Daniel Day-Lewis pulls off a great performance as the ultimate evil tycoon, who is flawed in every way possible. He is hollow. He is empty. And he won't settle down at any time.
Similarly, Paul Dano pulls off a stunning performance as the fanatical evangelical preacher, Eli. Speaking of which, this isn't a movie for heavily religious people. There is lots of rotten talking, and strange confessions.
The ending, however, is an awesome array of excellent back talking between Dano and Day-Lewis. And while I never imagined that these characters would make such creative use of bowling balls and bowling pins, I enjoyed watching how overly fanatical the two tycoons were.
This is a crazy film where nothing ever ends happy. This is a film about greed, greed and greed. Most of all, this is a film that really shows what happens when men are left unaccompanied with their greed, with no sign of sensitivity at all. It's fantastic and devilish, but it is also an extremely brilliant character study on masculine corporate power, which I've seen far too much of in the last few years.
Most of all, this is Daniel Day-Lewis in what could be his best performance ever.
Lives up to the hype
Almost invariably, movies that garner a lot of hype get very polarized reviews; the same applies to this movie, as evidenced by it's rough inverse bell curve of ratings (a greater proportion of extremely bad or good ratings than middling ones than most movies usually receive). Oftentimes, the much-hyped movies often deserve a lower rating than the hype merits. However, this is not the case with "There Will Be Blood".
This film really does live up to the hype, and in some ways exceeds it. I was astonished that there were so many 1- and 2- (and even 3) star ratings. Many of the lower ratings complained that the plot was choppy, and that the main character was essentially bad the whole way through, and didn't change his nasty ways. Others complained that the story was too moralistic (railing against the evil capitalist), or that it was incomprehensible. It is none of those things, however.
Not all characters, even protagonists, are supposed to come to a change-of-heart, or even a shocking self-realization that they are bad and that their ways have hurt others. In real life (as is so beautifully portrayed in this film), people don't always find the error of their ways. However, Daniel Plainview does have inner struggles (contrary to the opinion of some reviewers) in trying to reconcile his actions and their effects on his own life, the life of his son, and his relationship with his son, even if they aren't a large focus of the film or are not loudly and colorfully proclaimed. Ultimately, Daniel Plainview chooses (if that is the proper word), at the end of his struggle, to entirely shut himself off from others and from having any close or meaningful personal relationships; but this doesn't mean that the struggle wasn't there.
Furthermore, this film is not too choppy or abstract. It follows through an all the main themes and problems of the film and the characters and comes to a satisfactory conclusion for each (whether good or bad for the characters in question, or whether a traditional or non-traditional conclusion, is irrelevant). This is *not* an art film or some random abstraction piece made by an artsy, purposively (or even unconsciously) abstruse screenwriter or director. To say so implies that you have never seen a truly abstruse or incomprehensible film, such as the barely comprehensible (but interesting, yet in my opinion lesser) film "Pi". "There Will Be Blood" is one of the finest works of cinema an American has put out in years, and while it is not the Second Coming of Christ for cinema, it certainly ranks as a pretty darn holy event.
Deeply flawed, overhyped rubbish
Somehow, writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson can never get it right, and when he's combined with producer Scott Rudin ("The Addams Family Values"), the result is profoundly worse. Anderson's fetishist tendencies tend to prevent him from any real human understanding (call it "Quentin Tarantino Disease"). In this movie about an ambitious oil wildcatter, the audience is never given a reason to care about the main character, Daniel Plainview (histrionically played by Daniel Day-hyphenation), or to understand the roots of his unbridled ambition. He is evil, and so what? That he is contrasted with an equally unlikable evangelical preacher is totally without dramatic effect. If the oilman character is intended to be emblematic of mindless, ruthless capitalism, then "There Will Be Blood" is yet another boring morality play. Why not turn the same lens to Hollywood, where soulless accountants (Scott Rudin) produce "art" by investing in bankable comic book characters and movies by Anderson, whose deeply flawed works inevitably look cartoonish?
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