At 158 minutes, There Will Be Blood plays out like an old style Hollywood epic of the 1950’s. In the films first fifteen minutes, not a word is spoken. We see Daniel as a dirty, grizzled silver miner with an infant. Hacking away at stone at the bottom of a well mine, his anger evident with every strike, it is clear that Daniel is a man on a mission. Suddenly, his fight for silver ends when a ladder rung breaks, sending him plummeting to the bottom of the well that will surely be his grave. Plainview, not one to ever except failure or his own human frailty, hoists himself–broken leg and all–back to the surface to claim his find. He decides to blast the silver out of the pit to speed up the process. The blast rips apart the silver mine, but uncovers a ground oozing with oil. Daniel has found his ticket to the power he so craves.
There Will Be Blood moves at a slow but deliberate pace. Director Paul Thomas Anderson doesn’t explain the passage of time from one scene to the next or fully explain why Plainview is doing one particular thing or another. He fully expects the viewer to follow along, pay attention and fill in the empty spaces for themselves.
Anderson has put the film squarely on the shoulders of Daniel Day-Lewis. Lewis’ intense portrayal of Plainview allows the viewer to watch as the character slowly loses his faith in mankind and his ego takes over. There isn’t one single moment in There Will Be Blood where it becomes evident that Daniel’s faith in people is lost, but rather a culmination of events throughout the film. In previous films such as My Left Foot and In the Name of the Father, Day-Lewis has shown himself to be a master at playing characters with lots of pent up emotions. He does it with such subtlety that there isn’t a lot of yelling or violence until the character is so far gone, he is forced to release all of the pent up rage in one explosive burst.
Daniel Plainview engages in a battle of wills with another benevolent, power hungry man named Paul Sunday (Paul Dano). In exchange for $500, Sunday gives Plainview the location of a rich oil deposit in the small town of Little Boston. Daniel arrives in town to find Paul’s twin brother Eli (also played by Paul Dano), as the towns fire and brimstone preacher. Eli convinces his father Abel (David Willis) to sell Plainview their land for oil drilling, on the condition that Daniel make a sizable donation to Eli’s Church of the Third Revelation. Is Eli’s motivation strictly one of religious belief, or is he like his brother, driven by greed? That question remains unanswered as Daniel buys the land and continues his pursuit for oil.
Predictably, Daniel and Eli clash at every turn. Plainview forestalls paying his drilling fees to Eli and escalates to a beat down in the mud. Given Daniel’s need for absolute power, the feud eventually ends the only way it can: with a humiliating purification ceremony and the most violent scene showing little blood, I’ve seen in a long time.
There Will Be Blood is a powerful film. Daniel Day-Lewis seemed to become Daniel Plainview which lends an air of true authenticity to the film that is hard to ignore. Paul Dano deserves kudos as well for his portrayal of Eli own conversion into a different kind of power hungry individual. Sunday finds his power at the pulpit. He thrives on his ability to make people think he has a personal communication with God.
There Will Be Blood plays up the conflicts between religion and power. The question of religion comes up early in the film when Eli’s brother Paul asks Daniel his faith. Lying, Daniel says he embraces all religions. It’s never really clear why Paul went to Daniel in the first place or why Eli battled Daniel at every turn. In the case of young H.W., Did Daniel really use him as a ploy to get land and sympathy or are they really related? These specific questions are never answered, which left some holes in the film.
There Will Be Blood gets of track in the last forty five minutes or so of the film. By this time, Plainview is a pitiful shell of a man. Emotionally and physically crippled, Daniel has pushed away everything in his life but the oil. The undoing of those around him seems like one last shot for a film that was over in Little Boston. Few films at 158 minutes, even fairly good ones can maintain a high standard throughout. I felt like There Will Be Blood got caught up in being an “epic” and strayed from the strength of the story once Eli was removed from the proceedings for a good chunk of the film.
Disc One of There Will Be Blood offers the widescreen presentation of the film, enhanced for 16:9 television viewing. The picture is crisp and clear. Audio options include a Dolby Digital English 5.1 Surround Sound track, along with French and Spanish 5.1 choices. Disc Two offers the special features. “15 Minutes” is a slideshow of photos of late 1800s/early 1900s figures — oil prospectors, silver miners, frontier homesteaders, corporate tycoons — along with maps of the California oil fields tapped in this period. These stills are inter cut with soundless clips from the film, which sublimely demonstrate the pains taken by cinematographer Robert Elswit and production designer Jack Fisk to reproduce the people, places and life conditions during the oil boom. “Fishing” and “Haircut/Interrupted Hymn” contain deleted scenes from the film. “Dailies Gone Wild” is an extended take of the restaurant dinner scene between Daniel, H.W. and the Standard Oil men at the next table. The clip really gives you a sense of how Daniel Day-Lewis approaches his craft. You can see him working on the character, fleshing Daniel Plainview out to the man we would see in the final cut.
“The Story of Petroleum” is a silent documentary produced circa 1923. It tells the story of the California oil boom. Full of vintage photos from the late 1800s onward, ornate title cards and animated how-to maps for drilling down to crude deposits, The Story of Petroleum provides an interesting, though dated, history lesson.
The films trailer and teaser are also included on the second disc.
