There is also, as the title promises, blood in its many forms: blood that is spilled, blood that anoints, blood that binds. But even this sodden, violent outrush is transformed into something near-divine, when it catches aflame and blazes like the sword of an avenging angel-earth and water transubstantiated into air and fire.
When they finally tap a vein in Little Boston, the result is a cataclysmic gusher that stains the sky like arterial spray and tosses the unlucky H.W. Daniel and his men scratch at the earth with their primitive drills and explosives like surgeons probing a patient with medieval tools. The film has a carnal intensity, nowhere more evident than in its treatment of the early oil business, its danger and mystery and near-limitless possibility. This is a film about what churns under the surface, the vital, subterranean fluids that only occasionally explode into view: oil and blood, blood and oil. The wells come in and Daniel grows rich he builds a pipeline to the coast and grows richer still.īut There Will Be Blood is less about these material accomplishments than about what lies behind or, more properly, beneath them. O'Connor), a relationship that proves no less fraught. away, essentially replacing him in his heart with a long-lost half-brother (Kevin J.
#There will be blood series#
Over time, he stages a series of escalating feuds with a young preacher named Eli Sunday (Paul Dano), the God to his Mammon. Daniel sets upon the town and quickly begins buying up land and constructing his mighty derricks. One of these is Little Boston, a tiny California hamlet that sits upon oil like a cork atop a bottle.
(Dillon Freasier), is now his partner as well, a fact that figures prominently in the "family man" pitch with which he woos residents of a series of oil-rich towns. The adoption is equal parts compassion and calculation, as we learn when the tale shifts nine years forward, to 1911. Following the death of the man in the well, Daniel takes the deceased's infant son as his own, liberally spiking the baby's milk bottle with whiskey to quiet his bawling. The winner is oil entrepreneur Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis), and There Will Be Blood is the story of his success and his damnation. One hoists himself from the Earth's embrace the other is sucked into it. In these dialogue-free opening scenes, set to a score that buzzes like a plague of locusts, There Will Be Blood establishes itself as a film of Darwinian ferocity, a stark and pitiless parable of American capitalism. As he stands waist-deep in the seeping crude at the bottom, the jerry-rigged wooden derrick high above him splits and tumbles down, driving him into the muck. Then, another hole-this one dug for oil-and another man, this one not so lucky. Through savage will he somehow climbs back to the surface, where he drags himself across the arid land, twisting and flopping like the first fish to explore sandy shores. A solitary miner clawing at the earth with a pickaxe falls down a stony well and breaks his leg. Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood opens with a pair of primordial vignettes set at the turn of the century.
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