Cast: Daniel Day-Lewis (Daniel Plainview), Paul Dano (Paul/Eli Sunday)
Directed by: Paul Thomas Anderson
Release date: January, 2008
Based on the novel ‘Oil’ by Upton Sinclair, published in1927

‘There will be blood’ is a sprawling, surreal but flawed epic of intense rabid obsession. Set in the unforgiving barren landscapes of the American south at the turn of the nineteenth century, this sure is an ambitious movie. And it is driven by an all-consuming, force of nature performance by Daniel Day Lewis as a fiendish, monstrous caricature of a human being. And he is evenly matched in an astonishing turn by the young Paul Dano (from Little Miss Sunshine) as the fire and brimstone preacher.

The movie opens in 1898, with Daniel Plainview down in a pit shaft, prospecting for silver all alone. He breaks his leg but manages to drag himself out on one foot and goes crawling to get his silver extracted. He strikes oil and then he decides to turn into an oilman. He is shown drilling his first well…he goes on to drill more…the liquid gold gushes up making him rich …accidents occur…one of his workers dies slathered in the blackness. All this while there’s not even a single line of dialogue. Instead this prologue is told through stark mesmerizing silent images.

Daniel adopts the son of his dead worker. He needs the boy. He needs the sweet face for presenting himself as a family man and his business as a family business while pitching his proposals for buying land to the town and village communities.

One night a baby-faced young boy appears at his doorstep. Introducing himself as Paul Sunday, he offers to direct him for five hundred dollars to a town where oil seeps through the ground and land can be bought cheap. Daniel takes him up on the offer. He goes to the town with his son H.W. and parks himself as a guest at the Sunday ranch, under the ruse of hunting quail. And after he’s verified the presence of oil, he offers to buy up the ranch to old man Abel. But at ‘quail prices’ and not ‘oil prices’. The son Eli is aware of the oil and tries to extract a higher price and a promise for a donation to his church.

Soon, Daniel has bought out all the land in the area and set up his equipment. Eli Sunday offers to bless his endeavor on the day drilling is going to be started. Daniel agrees but when the time comes, snubs Eli in favor of his younger sister, Mary.

There is a fire on the very first day. Daniel’s son H.W. loses his hearing. And Daniel loses all use for him…he keeps him sedated with whisky in his milk. He grows cold towards H.W and sends him away. But this loss doesn’t appear to affect him in the slightest. Or any other obstacle for that matter…including an aggressive offer to buy out his operations for a million dollars by bigger rivals. He just carries on…making more and more and more money.

Meanwhile, Eli Sunday’s influence on the community is growing. He transforms himself into a supposed ‘faith healer’. Frothing at the mouth, he delivers his thundering sermons, imploring his congregation to banish the devil in their midst along with the devil in their heart. The bitter acrimony between Eli and Plainview escalates.

Daniel Plainview is an unscrupulous capitalist and an atheist to boot. Eli Sunday is a man of faith. But they are very much alike in their fanaticism and mania. They feed off each other.

Towards the end, the director loses his way somewhat, jumping forth almost fifteen years into the future. There is a sense of discontinuity here. Probably the movie is too short, when nowadays most movies outstay their welcome. Plainview by this time, old, white haired and eternally drunk, lives alone in a huge, ghostly mansion. All the madness culminates in a grotesque and horrific bloody climax.

Daniel Day Lewis inhabits the character so completely that you can feel the cold hatred and contempt dripping from his eyes…from the gaunt hard lines in his face. He doesn’t have an ounce of love or affection for anyone in his heart. He has crushed and weeded out any traces that might have lingered.

This movie shows the maturing of Paul Thomas Anderson as a director. He had already demonstrated his considerable talents in movies such as Boogie Nights and Magnolia. But here he takes a big risk by creating such a relentless and bleak period piece, with central characters as fascinating as they are unlikable. And he succeeds to a great extent in drawing us into a bygone world inhabited by individuals, defined by their single-minded obsessions.

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