My expectations were too high. My anticipation worked against me. It was too exclusive. Whatever the excuse or reason, “There Will Be Blood” is not the best movie of 2007 as I’d hoped, but hell, it sure is a damn good piece of dramatic filmmaking that flexes every single muscle of raw acting talent from each of its cast members involved. “There Will Be Blood” is likened to masterpieces such as “Citizen Kane” and “Giant,” and in many ways Paul Thomas Anderson aims his film down those roads but ends up with his own masterpiece of a man’s rise to power, and fall into his own lust for greed, oil, and his amoral misdeeds in the process.
“There Will Be Blood” is an immaculate production, and one that doesn’t particularly need to present itself with an abundance of dialogue to convey the incredible performances. Instead, Anderson drops down on the turn of the century draping the first fifteen minutes of the film in complete silence while telling the origin of one Daniel Plainview, and finally introduces us to the man who is an Oil Baron when we flash forward only a few years later. With the arm dressing of his young son, and the charm of an everyman, Plainview is a salesman and a devil that interrupts towns and small farms and promises incredible feats all in the name of achieving the goal of drilling for as much oil as he can muster up. Anderson’s film is always unsettling and he gives his characters almost endless open landscapes to toil and scheme in, all the while exploring the many different compositions of good and evil, and Plainview’s constantly withering humanity under the greed and his ill choices to gain a nose up on the “competition” he finds himself at constant war with.
As he explains to another character, everyone to him is competition, and that paranoia, paired with a local wannabe minister who seeks to undermine every inch of power and hold Plainview has on the community he seizes gives him a horrific direction down a devious path of ruin, and murder. Daniel Day Lewis is absolutely mesmerizing, just absolutely commanding the screen and garnering emotions of hatred, and sympathy while Anderson paints different shades of the man as a tragic figure and villain all at once. Lewis gives some of the best monologues of the film and makes Plainview one of the best Quixotic characters of modern film with immense shades of Charles Foster Kane, while Anderson constantly keeps him among the black ooze he makes his living on, and the barren wastelands for which he scrounges in.
He’s always a menacing presence on film and that’s thanks to Lewis who can make his grin under his thick mustache seem a shifty weapon among his associates, but he is a man who is never rich enough, and that often makes him his own worst enemy. One of the richer plot elements involves Eli’s son suffering a horrible accident that may just seal his fate and decide his life with his father and his oil. Among Daniel’s constant obstacles are Eli Sunday another two faced slithery animal who is a self-entitled profit placing himself above Plainview, but can never quite realize that he and his nemesis are one and the same, both playing on vulnerability and both seeking insurmountable gain from misery.
Paul Dano pleased in “Little Miss Sunshine,” but Anderson gives him the role of his career as Dano is often a despicable inch worm butting heads with Lewis on a constant basis, and Dano gives a fantastic performance. Anderson’s drama is a beautiful combination of incredible cinematography, plays on morals and a stern statement about oil and the search for the American dream and easily losing or selling your soul in a land of blood shed and depravity. Paul Thomas Anderson’s adaptation of a gorgeous display of excellent performances from the likes of Daniel Day Lewis, fantastic cinematography, and a tale good good and evil, and losing all sense of morals at the expense of greed. It’s a banner film for 2007.