There Will Be Blood

Once in a great while, a film comes along with such powerful artistic vision that it almost becomes a force of nature. It embosses itself on your consciousness and provides an unforgettable lens through which to view the world. Paul Thomas Anderson's "There Will Be Blood" is one of those films. It excels in all aspects of filmmaking, whether it be the directing, the writing, the sound production, or the cinematography. And it contains the best performance by an actor since Anthony Hopkins played Hannibal Lecter. There is no question that "There Will Be Blood" should be on your short list of films to see before you die.

The film is loosely based on the Upton Sinclair novel, "Oil!" I say "loosely based" because Paul Thomas Anderson takes many liberties with an ambitious oil man in the late nineteenth century. One of the most haunting parts of "There Will Be Blood" is how little has changed in what defines American business from the nineteenth century to the present time: the exploitation of the poor and natural resources in the name of progress and personal enrichment. The first twenty or so minutes of the film are a masterpiece, conveying the themes of blinding greed and the singular pursuit of wealth at the expense of others and even yourself in almost total silence.

Daniel Day Lewis is Daniel Plainview, a silver miner turned oilman who mercilessly ascends in the business world in the hopes of becoming a multimillionaire. Notice that I didn't say Lewis plays Daniel Plainview. That would be inaccurate. Daniel Day Lewis is one of those rare actors who doesn't act; he inhabits characters. His portrayal is seething, practically overflowing with raw emotion. Plainview is a man teeming with hatred, resentment, and impatience under high pressure.

While the film has a sequential plot in which Plainview, accompanied by his son, strikes a rich oil well in California and then tries to build a pipeline to the coast to avoid predatory shipping costs, the true story of the film involves the battles and truces between capitalism and religion as the unifying, motivating force in America. Just as the residents of Little Boston are promised salvation from their local minister, they are also promised roads, food, education, and shared wealth by Plainview and his arriving business venture. Each promise, of course, is untrue and unkept. Both the priest, played by Paul Dano, and the businessman are solely interested in their own power and wealth at the expense of those who trust them. Interestingly, both religion and capitalism use each other at certain times out of necessity to maintain their own sphere of influence. The church comforts the town when oil workers die of unsafe conditions while the opening of the huge drilling well provides a platform for the priest to pontificate. This perpetual melee persists until the end of the movie where there is decidedly a cinematic and historical victor.   

The most powerful aspect of "There Will Be Blood" is its relevance to the present day. The film was released a few months before the financial meltdown of 2008. Just as we see Plainview and the priest exploit a small town for money and power using empty rhetoric, we can see the bottomless greed of Wall Street destroy the lives of indigent people with immoral dealing designed to enrich only a few. You can imagine the following words, spoken by Plainview, recorded in a deposition incriminating Bernie Madoff or another of the financial elite that have separated themselves from humanity in the pursuit of money:

"I have a competition in me. I want no one else to succeed. I hate most people...

There are times when I... I look at people and I see nothing worth liking. I want to earn enough money I can get away from everyone.

...I see the worst in people, Henry. I don't need to look past seeing them to get all I need. I've built up my hatreds over the years, little by little. Having you here gives me a second breath of life. I can't keep doing this on my own... with these, umm... people."

What is clever about the film is that it takes the ambitious entrepreneur of American folklore and shows the unipolar realities of economic growth and challenges our view of "prosperity," if you can even call it that. Plainview casts away everything and everyone in his life, including his son and brother, when they fail to be useful in building his empire. When his son rejects Plainview's ruthless business sense, he downgrades his progeny to "a bastard in a basket." In the end, it all comes back to Daniel Day Lewis's performance. For Daniel Plainview, like Jay Gatsby just a few years later, the price of the American Dream is his soul.