***1/2 Stars
There Will Be Blood is soaked with the obscurity of Daniel Day Lewis's character, which is sort of the point. Beneath the surface, this character is so desperate and greedy for oil that he will give up anything to succeed in the industry, even his adopted son.
So what's the film trying to tell us? Well I guess that nothing has changed since the turn of the nineteenth century and we are still dependent on oil. You would think an alternate fuel would be invented even before a thought of landing on the moon, but I guess no matter what technology we build, some things don't change. For another example, we have the scientific ability to transform a human heart, but no set-and-stone cure for the common cold.
Daniel Day-Lewis's performance is a revelation, one of the best you'll see all year. He may only make a handful of movies a decade but he is still one of the most mesmerizing actors in the film industry (check out him as Bill the Butcher in Scorsese's Gangs of New York and try to sleep that one off). He plays Daniel Plainview, a silver digger turned oil tycoon in just under a decade. The film begins with basically no dialogue for twenty minutes. It is scary in its own haunting way, watching Plainview dig for silver in the New Mexico wilderness. He breaks his leg but finds an ocean of oil under him in the process. He hires a crew and takes them to the site to dig it up. One man who dies had an infant son who is adopted by Plainview. Nine years later, Plainview becomes moderately successful in the industry and he and his adopted son H.W travel to a ranch to find another ocean of money with the information coming from a young man named Paul Sunday(a powerful Paul Dano). Plainview checks out the area and agrees to dig there. Paul's twin brother Eli tells him that a $10,000 donation to Eli's church must be granted if he digs here. Plainview agrees.
Now the film wants you to believe that Paul and Eli are different people, but we never see them together and both are literally 100% identical in both appearance and the tone of their voices. So I conclude that they (I mean he) is up to something.
Plainview is an excellent speaker and he doesn't even know it. His speech to the Sunday Ranch is very convincing, giving false hope to the residents that this oil will bring them all fortune. In the first steps of his plan, things begin to go smoothly, but director Paul Thomas Anderson knows that the story needs to end in tragedy. Plainview begins to question everyone he meets and will go to the lengths of killing men to sustain his thirst for sovereignty.
In order to understand Daniel Plainview's motives, it is important to realize that he hates all men, hates everything about them, and will do anything to make sure only he succeeds and everyone else fails. With this philosophy, it is hard to believe that you don't hate yourself in the process, which Plainview will understand later on in the film.
I've seen this film twice now and I'm still having a hard time with the foundation of the plot. It is loosely based on Upton Sinclair's 1927 novel Oil!, but in a Paul Thomas Anderson film it is always hard to determine what is actually occurring on screen. For me, There Will Be Blood is some sort of apocalyptic theory that foreshadows the worlds downfall with its obsession of greed, even though this takes place almost one-hundred years prior to present day. I guess the only problem I have with There Will Be Blood is that Plainview is a hard man to care about because he has nothing to lose. He has no loved-ones, no friends, and no regrets about his past. So when his tragic downfall occurs, I had a hard time feeling for his character. If you can ignore that, you will see that this is Daniel Day-Lewis's show, managing to capture the poignant evil of this man as he slowly meets his demise. The film runs long (almost three hours) but it is important that it feels long because it takes infinite moments for a story like this to settle in an ocean of greed, in this case one that lasts a lifetime.
