There Will be Blood

By Linda Winsh-Bolard

Based, very loosely, on Upton Sinclair novel Oil! (1927) which is said to be based on oil strike in Signal Hill, Long Beach, California.

In the middle of 19th century the American West became the dream, and death, of many. Among the riches thought was oil.

Daniel Plainview (Daniel day-Lewis) calls himself an oilman and is proud to be one. What it really means we can see at the opening of the film: Plainview is persuading hard working people in some small God forgotten place (Coyote Hills) to give up their farms for small payments, or even smaller percentage of profit that he will get drilling for oil on their land. Profit payable only if there is oil. When they ask questions, he ditches them.

In an accident at the well, oil business is very accident-prone even today; a man dies leaving behind his baby son. Plainview pounces on the baby; nothing like a family man with a sweet baby to make people trust him.

Then comes a surprising opportunity: a young man, Paul Sunday, is willing to betray his family for a some money. He tells Plainview of the wonders of California oil. Plainview is hooked. He travels to the Sunday ranch and attempts to purchase their land as well as everybody else’s around. For the first time he meets an adversary: a preacher. Eli Sunday, brother of Paul, is the preacher of the Church of Third Revelation and he wants the Church to get money as well as his Father to be paid fairly for his land.

Sunday and Plainview are locked in greed and power struggle. Both share the need to be the first one, the admired one, the only one. Both are utterly remorseless, reckless and determined.

Plainview is somehow crazier.

There are distant echoes of Citizen Kane, but these are so distant that they leave few traces. There Will Be Blood is, despite the bloodiness and cruelty, a static film where only the camera moves and passing of time is marked by subtitles.

Daniel Plainview does not develop, change, or for that matter become more or less human. All he wants is money and power, it is all that he ever wanted, and the means of getting it are indifferent to him. He needs no luxuries, no women, no life, just going ahead.
When his unknown brother Henry shows up, Daniel at least finds somebody to talk to, but his talk is always about himself and his hatred for all humans. "I hate most people," Daniel says. "I want to earn enough money so I can get away from everyone.” We now hear what we have seen earlier.

Eli Sunday is equally static character. He wants money for his Church, he wants to preach at that Church and he wants to become a well-known and powerful preacher. Any means will do. From the beginning to the end.

It makes the combine evil of capitalism and church look rather unnaturally grotesque and flat.

Had there been some smidgen of normal social life, of the society that produced and propped these men up, it might work better. Had there been women( it does get annoying, all these pioneering films with no women in them- how precisely had the pioneers managed not to die out? ) And had their role been defined, it might have been better.

But all at all, character development tends to be the lynch pin of epic dramas and there is none in this film.

Which leaves us with a question: why was the movie made? What was it supposed to show, to say, to warn off?

Upton Sinclair warns against unbridled capitalism. He would have been pleased that nearly hundred years later, finally, there are scientists even in America who are also starting to warn against what the Europeans did away with some 60 years ago.

But the idea of the horrors of society with no restrictions against brutal greed, no protection against naked ambition, indeed, a society that admires such men is lost in a film that has no society in it.

Daniel Plainview fights no private demons; he does no overcome any morale scruples or personal habits. He is hard man, hard on himself- in the first scene he breaks his leg while mining silver and drags himself up the mine shaft and into the town to sell the silver and register the mine, but what made him so, if anything, is also absent.

It becomes an odd portrait of the people who nearly destroyed natural resources of the West, but you have to know a lot of history to connect the film to the Dust Bowl.

Shot in Texas, in the same landscape as No Country for Old Men, equally beautifully and with lots of now long gone greenery to mark the land. This is intercut with the dry derricks and parched land after the water and minerals are gone. The first 15 minutes are nearly without dialog, yet the action is clear and easily communicated.

Much has been said about Daniel Day-Lewis imitating Huston vocals for his character, without judging, I have admit that his voice has deep, syrupy quality with clear enunciation, possibly not what an upcoming oil man would have possessed. Else then that both, Daniel Day-Lewis and Paul Dano, are utterly convincing in their two dimensional characters, so is life beaten Henry played by Kevin J. O’Connor. Young Dillon Freasier is very good as H.W. Plainview, the boy who realizes much but can do little about it all. Casting had worked well for the supporting parts as well, but they are remarkably minor roles adding little to the story and practically nothing to the main characters.

A Paramount Vantage (in U.S.)/Miramax (international) release and presentation of a JoAnne Sellar/Ghoulardi Film Co. production. Produced by Paul Thomas Anderson, Sellar, Daniel Lupi. Executive producers, Scott Rudin, Eric Schlosser, David Williams. Directed, written by Paul Thomas Anderson, loosely based on the novel "Oil!" by Upton Sinclair, Camera: Robert Elswit.

Daniel Plainview - Daniel Day-Lewis
Paul and Eli Sunday - Paul Dano
Henry - Kevin J. O'Connor
Fletcher - Ciaran Hinds
H.W. Plainview - Dillon Freasier
Mary Sunday - Sydney McCallister
Abel Sunday - David Willis
H.M. Tilford - David Warshofsky
William Bandy - Colton Woodward
Adult Mary Sunday - Colleen Foy
Adult H.W - Russell Harvard