Life > February 21, 2008

By By Kara Peruccio | Life editor

As a dedicated moviegoer, I was intrigued by There Will Be Blood. Based loosely on muckracker Upton Sinclair’s Oil!, the movie follows the life of Daniel Plainview, a self-made oil magnate in pursuit of the American dream. Blood has garnered many accolades and features one of the greatest actors of our time, Daniel Day-Lewis.

click to enlarge

The Irish thespian is chilling and destined for Oscar gold with this performance.

The first 10 minutes are silent as the camera pans around a harsh frontier. It is 1898 and Daniel Plainview, a silver miner, is hard at work in his mining hole. He struggles for awhile and this continues for several minutes until he finds what he is looking for.

He eventually turns from silver to oil and begins working on a small rig. Tragedy strikes as one of his workers dies while working down the well.

The man had been previously seen with an infant and in the next scene, Daniel sits on a train with a baby though it’s not confirmed if the child is Daniel’s or the other man’s. He is a clueless parent and in a funny scene gives the baby liquor.

The film jumps ahead to 1911 and Plainview, with his son and partner, H.W. (Dillon Freasier), now run a booming enterprise. One night after delivering a rousing business proposal, a young man named Paul Sunday (Little Miss Sunshine’s Paul Dano) tells the Plainviews about oil located on his family’s homestead in Little Boston, Calif. Paul demands money for his tip and if proven successful, he will receive a bonus. Daniel warns the boy that he better not be lying and this is the last we see of Paul for the rest of the film.

With H.W. in tow, Daniel goes to the Sunday ranch under the premise of quail-hunting. Paul’s father Able welcomes them to his land and sends his son, Eli (also played by Dano), with wood for Daniel’s campfire. At first Daniel is perplexed but realizes Eli and Paul are twins.

While hunting, H.W. notices that his shoe has a black, sticky substance on the bottom. He shows his father and Daniel realizes they are standing above “an ocean of oil.” Daniel offers to buy the land from the Sundays but does not mention oil. Eli, however, wants to raise the price as he too knows about the oil.

After back and forth negotiations, Plainview promises to pay the Sundays $5,000 for Eli’s church, The Church of the Third Revelation. He is an evangelical faith healer whose prayers make Daniel uncomfortable and suspicious.

Daniel wants to build a pipeline to the ocean to cut out shipping costs but refuses to see the one holdout as to not appear desperate (a fact that is very important throughout the film).

At the town meeting, Plainview promises to help Little Boston rebuild. Eli asks that he makes a blessing at the first drilling at the oil rig, but his request appears to be more of an order.

At the event, Daniel humorously snubs the preacher and gives the blessing himself: this leads to a full-scale power struggle between the two men.

Tragedy strikes at the well when H.W. becomes deaf following an oil blast. The accident highlights the two sides of Daniel: he is both ambitious and ruthless but also deeply concerned about his son who has become distant and angry.

The rest of the movie threads through very important themes: the evils of oil, the divide between religion and agnosticism, greed, family ties and the American dream. As a whole, There Will Be Blood is unsettling, depressing and probably the darkest movie you will ever see. Day-Lewis is skillful at portraying a man it’s very easy to simultaneously hate and feel sorry for. Despite all of the darkness, there are some humorous parts. Daniel’s baptism scene is quite funny and drew many laughs in the audience.

Director Paul Thomas Anderson, though, does his best work in exposing how greed ruins a person’s life. The final showdown between Daniel and Eli is very dramatic, and we see where the film earns its title.

The movie clocks in at just less than three hours and there are several points in the film in which you wish it would hurry up.

The score by Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood is brilliant and serves as its own character in the film. Besides Day-Lewis, the young actors hold their own on the screen.

Dillon Freasier plays H.W. perfectly and shows talent beyond his years. Paul Dano does a spectacular job and was quite convincing as the evangelical minister.

Nominated for eight Academy Awards including best picture, There Will Be Blood is visionary and will leave you thinking for days. While I do not think it will win the coveted Oscar for best film, Day-Lewis earned and deserves his statue for his turn as the epitome of all that is evil in our materialistic society.