There Will Be Blood

Get your land for nothing and your oil for free

Daniel Plainview is a business man. A man who has crawled through the desert, with a broken leg, to deliver silver for money. A man who has seen his business partner killed during drilling for oil. A man who makes his only son a business partner first, before a son. His obsession with drilling and making money makes him powerful and richer than most people. He knows oil, he knows business and, most of all, he knows who the competition is… anyone who isn’t working for him. On a very strange evening, Daniel is paid a visit from a strange man named Paul Sunday. Paul gives Daniel information regarding the whereabouts of a large deposit of oil. Daniel then proceeds out to some remote portion of California and discovers an entire wealth of oil, fresh and waiting to be drilled. Regretfully, life is not that easy for Daniel, throughout the story he contends with Eli Sunday (Paul’s original self) and everyone’s constant obsession with religion in the region. No matter what Daniel runs into, he is a driven man, one who will stop at nothing to see his oil appear and his money to follow.

How did this not win ‘Best Picture’ at this year’s Academy Award show? I’m stifled by that. Don’t get me wrong I’m sure that No Country for Old Men spoke to the masses, but I certainly don’t get how it was better than this. Paul Thomas Anderson put together a haunting storyline about one man’s obsession with succeeding and beating out the competition, regardless of cost, that you can’t take your eyes off of Daniel Day-Lewis’s character. While obviously taking this story from a book (Upton Sinclair’s Oil), it seems like Lewis was the perfect actor for this role. I can’t imagine anyone else pulling this off. Anderson probably saw Lewis as the actor as he was reading and researching the book, which is a perfect selection. Overall, it was great pacing by the director, good scenes, superb dialogue and so many visuals (which you can thank Robert Elswit for — beautiful eye for scenery) that you’ll be taken in, much like Plainview is with oil.

For a film that was lengthy, you certainly didn’t mind as a viewer taking in a bit more of Daniel Plainview, who has got to be one of the most villainous characters in a film. There Will Be Blood is a great movie showing the dark life of someone who cares nothing for people around him, and cares more for the money he can take from them. Not to say that Daniel Plainview is a thief, not in the literal sense, rather he monetarily cheats people into giving up land. For example, when he approaches the Sunday family about obtaining their land, he tries to convince them that his purpose for the purchase is for Quail hunting. In the end, you’ll see where this guy’s heart truly lies. He not only fools people into buying his bit about how great he is, though he does back it up, but he also fools the audience in regards to his relationship with his son. It’s tragic and terrible, and you’ll feel it full force. This is how effective and powerful Daniel Day-Lewis is as Daniel Plainview.