The Tie That Binds: A Review of 'There Will Be Blood'

Paul Thomas Anderson has been quoted as saying he had to learn how to direct all over again in order to tackle the filming of Upton Sinclair’s novel Oil!, a sprawling and accusatory novel about Californian oil production at the start of the twentieth century. While it shares the extended symphonic movements of Magnolia, the slowly encroaching meltdown of Boogie Nights and the sharp use of music of Punch Drunk Love, There Will Be Blood is certainly a departure for the writer-director, and one which reveals him to be a filmmaker who can move beyond the eclectic post-modern chaos he has previously revelled in.

The story is that of Daniel Plainview, an oil prospector who gets word of a potentially massive reservoir of oil in a sleepy desert town; he settles there, and goes about constructing the apparatus to acquire both the oil and the goodwill of the locals. Daniel Day-Lewis, never an actor to be accused of apathy, delivers a tremendous performance as Plainview, a man whose attempts at personability are just off-note enough to be resolutely unsettling. He is cast opposite the young Paul Dano (of Little Miss Sunshine fame, of all things) as Eli Sunday, whose single-minded desire to construct a religious community in the town around his own theatrical preacher-shtick is as monomaniacal as Plainview’s own obsession for obtaining black gold. The potential for mutually beneficial cooperation is suggested, but what is seen as the natural enmity between organised religion and capital enterprise sows leads to inevitable violent conflict between the two.

The characters veer dangerously close to empty ideologues, and in a different context this would appear simplistic and unenlightening; however, Anderson constructs the film as a kind of fable about the manipulative nature of those who wish to be patriarchs. Oil may be the catalyst, but the sadism which gradually unleashes itself from the souls of these men has nothing to do with the material world – twinned scenes of Plainview and Sunday being forced to accept the creed of the other reveal the extent to which greed can override any other scruples a man may have.

‘I look at people and I see nothing worth liking,’ Plainview states at one point, and the world depicted is indeed an unpleasant one, violence and betrayal lying below the surface, bubbling up during times of seismic activity, and being unleashed by those with power. The craftsmanship with which this is depicted is nothing less than astonishing, Jonny Greenwood’s music drawing a viewer hypnotically into the story from the first frame. There Will Be Blood presents little which is worth liking, but much to be admired.