There Will Be Blood: A Soulless Examination of Two Men
Daniel Day-Lewis and Paul Dano

By Leah Stratmann February 7, 2008 Issue

For the first ten or fifteen minutes of this sweeping epic about the life and times of Daniel Plainview and the emergence of the California oil fields, not a word is spoken. In fact, minimal is a word that applies to the entire film covering a period from 1898 to 1927.

The film opens with Daniel Day-Louis as Plainview scrabbling out a living as a silver miner. In 1898, when tapping into what he hopes is a silver strike, he breaks his leg. He manages to drag himself to town and hire a crew to work his strike, including a man with an infant son.

As the silver is played out in the mine, oil bubbles to the surface and changes the direction of Plainview’s life from miner to wildcatter, but not before the young father is killed in a drilling accident. Taking the baby as his own and naming him H.W., he begins to build his oil drilling business, After achieving a modest amount of success, he begins traveling the countryside and buying leases from farmers and ranchers, hoping for an oil strike and explaining that he works in the field right beside his crews, unlike the big oil companies such as Standard Oil.

Ultimately a young man comes to him with information on where he believes a large oil field is available in northern California, at his family’s farm in Little Boston, Calif. The stranger is cagey about the location until a deal is struck. Plainview goes to the area with H.W. posing as quail hunters and confirms the information leaked to him by Paul Sunday.

Plainview negotiates a lease with the family patriarch, but must also contend the son Eli Sunday, a nakedly ambitious charismatic preacher and faith healer, who wants money toward the building of his Church of the Third Revelation. When a deal is struck between father and son, Sunday wants to pray over the deal and for the success of the venture, but Plainview refuses.

Thus sets up the remainder of the film with greed as the central ingredient for both men. The performance of Day-Lewis in this film is being given a lot of attention, but the burning intensity of the performance by Paul Dano as the twin Sundays is riveting. Plainview refuses to be drawn into the church, even while Sunday convinces most of the crew to attend church on a daily basis. As Plainview hires a crew and proceeds to drill his first well, he is also busy buying up land and oil leases in most of the surrounding area as well. It is his intention to build his own pipeline so as to be free of the cost of shipping oil via the railroad.

When the first well comes in, an explosion occurs which deafens the young H.W. Also appearing on the scene is a man claiming to be Plainfield’s half brother, Henry. Because he knows details about Plainfield’s life in Wisconsin only a family member could know, Plainfield takes him on a worker and confidante. Meanwhile H.W. has gone from being a solemn young man who is constantly by his father’s side into a sullen stranger. Sensing Henry is replacing him in his father’s affections, H.W. tries to burn down the cabin where the brothers are sleeping.

When Sunday confronts Plainview about paying him the remainder of the promised money, Plainview slaps him to the ground, screaming that he is a soulless charlatan; otherwise he would have cured his son’s deafness. Plainview is quick to violence when he senses the situation calls for it, but never with H.W. After the incident with the fire, Plainfield sends him off to a boarding school for the deaf.

Ultimately Plainview gives into Sunday’s wish to join the church, but he does it under false pretenses in order to secure the last piece of land needed for his pipeline. Sunday thinks he has made a convert who will supply the church with steady cash, but Plainview feels no such conversion, only satisfaction at achieving what he wants. As he himself says in the film, he wants no one else to succeed.

Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson from his screenplay of the novel by Upton Sinclair, this is a taut drama, although it is overlong at two hours and 48 minutes. It could have benefited by much tighter editing.

While I could enjoy the craftsmanship of all of the performers, I didn’t particularly like the film and not for any reason I could readily identify. The length made me fidget and I didn’t care about a single character in it. The lush photography made for a visual feast with locations in New Mexico and Texas, but that is not enough.

Bottom Line: A primer for actor wannabes; a waste of time for me.


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