There Will Be Blood (2007)
There Will Be Blood is the first film I saw that felt as rich and fulfilling as a great novel. I watched it at the age of 13 and spent day after bleary day at school consumed by it. I wasn’t just fixated on its epic story and larger-than-life characters, I had strips of the film playing on repeat behind my eyes as though they’d been tattooed inside my brain. I saw Daniel Plainview rising above the waves of the Pacific Ocean, the geyser of oil burning against the night and the blood spreading from Eli Sunday’s head. It was my first Paul Thomas Anderson film. As with any first viewing, I was unable to place the film in a broader context and understand exactly what it was that made me love it. I was simply convinced that I had seen something monumental, unforgettable and incredibly important. Just for having seen it, I felt set apart from everyone else around me.
Only now do I feel qualified to explain its power over me.
This film was a complete change of pace for its director. Paul Thomas Anderson’s first four movies drew heavily from his great inspirations: Martin Scorsese and Robert Altman. They followed strange, isolated, lost characters who worked hard to find love, join a family or right old wrongs. The lifeblood of Hard Eight, Boogie Nights, Magnolia and Punch Drunk Love is their tight-knit, overlapping social worlds. With elaborate camera swoops and frenetic editing, Anderson created energetic tapestries out of his communities of losers, has-beens and wannabes. Though always distinct from his contemporaries, Anderson fit snugly into the 90s Hollywood auteur scene. There aren’t a million miles of difference between Pulp Fiction and Boogie Nights. This first period of the director’s career ended suddenly after the release of Punch Drunk Love.
There were five years of silence before Anderson ditched his troupe of indie regulars to return with an epic period piece starring an Oscar-winning leading man. The bustling streets and seedy suburbs of Los Angeles were replaced by an empty, blasted desert. The quirky pop needle drops were switched out for a menacing original score by Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood. The quick cuts and Scorsese-style swoops were abandoned entirely. The formerly playful, frenetic director now became eager to take things slow and create contemplative, tense sequences that play out in lengthy, unbroken shots. It almost feels as though Anderson took the picture of Robert Altman off his mantle piece and swapped it for pictures of David Lean and Stanley Kubrick.
This is clear right from the movie’s start. Boogie Nights begins with an ostentatious, swooping long-take into a night-club scored to Disco music. Magnolia begins with a series of rapid fire tales of bizarre coincidences delivered to us by a magician. There Will Be Blood starts with a near-wordless 15-minute sequence in the wilderness. We see a lone figure in a dark pit cut into a wall of stone with a pick-axe as a wailing score warns us of impending danger. Sparks, dust, spit, fire, a broken leg, a baptism by oil, blood, train tracks. With barely a word, we’re taken into the raw elements of life as a Californian prospector at the death of the 19th Century. It’s a staggeringly raw, mesmerising, tactile opening that absolutely radiates control and confidence. Watching it, we see that the charming flashiness of the 90s was just a stepping stone to Anderson’s most polished work.
Prospector Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) builds a fortune digging through the Californian desert. He risks his life and breaks bones, but manages to find silver and oil. He becomes a travelling showman for the bountiful opportunities of free-market capitalism. He passes from town to town, adopted son in tow, making pitches to control local oil reserves. After a tip-off from an industrious homesteader’s son, Daniel arrives in the dead-end town of Little Boston, a collection of threadbare shacks sitting on top of an ocean of crude oil. The rest of the film sees Daniel wrestle for control of the town against local preacher Eli Sunday (Paul Dano). Their battle will last decades, and there will be blood.
With this story of manifest destiny, Paul Thomas Anderson became an American artist on the level of Francis Ford Coppola or Terrence Malick. He crafted out a unique cinematic space and moved into in with complete and utter dedication and commitment. He wasn’t a student of great cinema anymore, he was a confirmed practitioner. Anderson moved out of his comfort zone and into a bold, new, uncompromising territory outside of Los Angeles. This grand story feels novelistic, political and colossal. There Will Be Blood isn’t the first great movie that it’s director made, but it’s the first that feels completely confident in its own, unique skin. This is no one else’s film. It’s an unabashedly auteurist project that declares its importance with pride. Anderson carries this certainty on to his future projects, which quickly became more abstract, opaque and personal.
Observe the care and dedication in Jack Fisk’s stunning production design. Drink in the overwhelming scale and power of Robert Elswit’s cinematography. Bask in how authentic and perfectly judged the casting is. On a technical level, There Will Be Blood is a perfect feat of filmmaking. It sees a great director working with the right cast, the perfect crew and the ideal material. It’s almost too easy to craft a great American story out of oil prospecting. Every element you need to sum up American history is right there: the individual, money, business, the earth, the environment, exploitation, family, church, politics. It’s all delivered on a plate. Anderson makes use of every ingredient superbly.
There Will Be Blood is a mesmerising, grandiose saga. It follows a murderous, psychopathic capitalist superman who colonises his own nation with oil outposts. He can’t be happy in victory unless all of his competitors lose and lose badly. He resents anyone who opposes him, or pushes back in any way at all, with a biblical fury. It’s fitting that the only institutional force with the power to take him on is the church. Eli, a money-hungry zealot who resents Plainview’s usurpation of his role as Little Boston’s central authority figure, openly challenges Daniel and refuses to bow to his word. Watch how Eli behaves when he’s alone with his family. He’s just as unhinged as his rival.
Plainview could pay off Eli and be done with him, but his pride won’t allow it. As the oil concern grows, family tragedy strikes and plans are drawn for a pipeline to the Pacific, Eli remains the only true obstacle in Daniel’s way. Eli humiliates him. It’s possible that no-one else has ever done this to Daniel before. The culmination of their struggle is a messy, drunken scuffle in a private bowling alley. It’s as though Anderson is telling us that despite the influence these men wield and the larger-than-life personas that they’ve crafted for themselves, they’re no better than town drunks punching it out on a bad Friday night. They aren’t worthy of a grand battlefield.
Look at Plainview in this final scene. He’s a scruffy millionaire, hunched over scraps of meat, sweating and stumbling through his mansion like a dying monster. Eli is slicker, neater and prettier, but he’s even more pathetic. Listen to him on god: “he’s completely failed to alert me to the recent panic in our economy”. Eli is a power-hungry boy who learnt young in life that the Church was his best bet for gaining influence. It did him well, but his hollow vision of the almighty can’t compete against the dollar. Eli’s hunger for power ends up killing him.
There Will Be Blood was Anderson’s definitive leap into unquestionable greatness. It’s a timeless literary epic without a hint of insincerity or faddish compromise. There’s nothing opaque or obscure about it, just as there’s nothing shallow or simplistic. It’s full of meat, meaning, power and magnificence. Everyone has their favourite Anderson picture, but this has to be the consensus choice for his best work. It has absolutely everything that great movies are made of. As for the rest of the movie’s political illusions? It’s a Bush-era project where the antihero murders in his quest for oil and cloaks himself in the church for legitimacy. Daniel Plainview could be Dubya’s grandad. Why else would he name his son H.W?