‘There Will be Blood’
‘There Will be Blood’ is the latest in a string of 2007 films hell bent on depending on an audience’s use of their brain just as much as their eyes. Writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson has taken Upton Sinclair’s 1927 novel “Oil!” and woven an interesting character piece drenched in dust and darkness.
From the start and all the way through to the end you never quite know what to think of protagonist Daniel Plainview, but every move he makes in the film’s two-and-a-half-hour runtime weighs on your mind for days after viewing.
The story begins in 1898 as Daniel Day-Lewis as Plainview is seen digging deep in the bowels of the earth for silver and gold. The dusty scratch of skin against rock and the torturous theme presented by the score performed by Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood instantly tells you this isn’t going to be your average drama. The music from the outset implies a Kubrick-ian character study as Plainview could just as easily be compared to Charles Foster Kane (as he has) as he could be to Jack Torrance.
Flash forward 13 years later and Plainview is a different man. He is an oil man, and to hear him speak is to hear a man you may trust, but all the while you realize there is a beast just below the surface that isn’t only there to suck the Earth dry of its oil but to suck dry anything that would stand in his way. Plainview’s fortunes change when he is visited by a man named Paul Sunday.
Claiming to know of land rich with oil he sells the secret for a reasonable price. Plainview then descends upon the Sunday family ranch under false pretenses only to begin drilling for oil and changing the landscape of the small town known as Little Boston forever.
watch the trailer after the jump
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