Weeks before its release, Paul Thomas Anderson's highly anticipated oil drama has already been gathering critical accolades and awards, and rightfully so: there's no doubt in my mind that Anderson has made the defining movie of 2007 -- a year, after all, when the world may have passed peak oil production and continues to shed rivers of blood over who controls it. What better time to investigate the beginnings of our civilization's addiction to the non-renewable resource?
Crammed with richly textured scenes of breathtaking intensity and the dazzling assurance of a mature director, the greatness of
There Will Be Blood is apparent from the first screaming shot of the film's uncredited hero: the land. Loosely based on Upton Sinclair's muckraking novel
Oil!,
There Will Be Blood tells an all-American epic of opportunity and corruption, following the career of Daniel Plainview, an up-by-your-bootstraps entrepreneur and self-made tycoon portrayed with devastating abandon by a masterful Daniel Day-Lewis.
In the wordless opening scenes, set to Jonny Greenwood's thrilling score, we spot Plainview, a silver prospector, huddling on the ground like the apes in 2001: A Space Odyssey. His life-changing monolith comes in the shape of a sticky black liquid that he first collects with bucket and saucepan. A mysterious tip sends the shrewd, limping Plainview to central California, a place pregnant with wealth, savvy hucksters, and false prophets, where nobody's beliefs are sacred when there's money to be made. With his "son and partner" H.W. (Dillon Freasier) at his side -- a boy who's been baptized with a smear of oil -- Plainview begins to buy up land.
Paul Dano and Daniel Day-Lewis in There Will Be Blood
Paramount Vantage
In a run-down frontier town called Little Boston, he discovers an "ocean of oil under our feet" and builds the derricks that will "blow gold all over the place." Not everybody is taken in by Plainview's promises of flourishing tomorrows. Firebrand preacher and faith healer Eli Sunday (Paul Dano), equally adept at driving out the devil as he is at driving up prices, has his own designs.
In the role of the pimply head of Little Boston's ramshackle Church of the Third Revelation and Plainview's sanctimonious nemesis, Dano's fiery performance took my breath away. Anderson has described There Will Be Blood as "a battle between two men who see each other for what they are," and the scenes between the seasoned oilman and the young man of God are among the most reckless and revelatory cinema has to offer. Blood flows, at first by accident and soon, by design.
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