There Will Be Blood

A bone fide American epic that seems to have been carved out of the very earth. It’s built around a tour de force performance from Daniel Day Lewis – arguably the pinnacle of his career – as Daniel Plainview, a prospector turned oilman in the early days of the twentieth century, a pioneer capitalist and the quintessential self-made man.

Spanning the period from 1898 to 1928, but largely set in southern California before WWI, the movie is structured as a slow reveal. It’s not much of a spoiler to say things end badly: the ominous tone is set from the first notes of Jonny Greenwood’s unsettling score, a discordant orchestral piece influenced by Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki, whose music haunted The Exorcist and The Shining.

The violence promised in the title erupts from nature herself. Strikes and gushers lash out in accidents that smack of retribution, claiming several men before we’ve even heard a word spoken (the first quarter of an hour is entirely speechless). But violence is also bottled up deep in Plainview, a driven, obsessive entrepreneur who calculates his words for maximum profit and keeps a tally in his head.

What measure of man is this? Initially we may admire his acumen and zeal. He adopts the orphaned son of a colleague and brings him up as his own. Day-Lewis affects a shewd, eminently respectable demeanour. His voice rich and seasoned (and sounding echoes of John Huston’s Noah Cross in Chinatown), Plainview pitches the common good, schools and churches. It’s true he seizes opportunity ruthlessly when it comes, but he brings prosperity in his wake. It’s only when he takes the Almighty for an enemy (in the person of Paul Dano’s evangelical preacher Eli Sunday) that we begin to realise the extent to which he’s motivated by rancour and pride.

Money and religion: these are grand themes, twin pillars of civilization, and Anderson maps them with a surveyor’s meticulous patience and precision. Climaxing on the eve of the Great Depression, and released in 2007, on the eve of this century’s great stockmarket crash, There Will Be Blood assumes fresh relevance and resonance in the era of Donald Trump, a man in Daniel Plainview’s own image, the American Capitalist irredeemable and unrepentent.

A force beyond categories.

Roger Ebert

Media Partner