(Warning: There Will Be Spoilers)
Doug Geivett
February 15, 2008
Looking like Tom Selleck and sounding like Sean Connery, Daniel Day-Lewis rescues a film otherwise destined for oblivion. There Will Be Blood is a long film: two hours and 38 minutes. That’s a lot of dramatic tonnage for one actor to shoulder. But Day-Lewis is brilliant in his role as oilman Daniel Plainview, and he deserves his Academy Award nomination for best leading actor. The story and the screenplay are strong enough to complement his talents, but his acting is clearly the best thing about the film.
In the opening scene, Plainview is shown chipping away at rock in the bottom of a simple mineshaft. It’s late in the 19th century. The implements are crude. The surrounding countryside is desolate. The man is alone, and he doesn’t seem to care. His hands are shown close up. He’s been at this for a long while. So far, the mine has yielded nothing of value. But Plainview’s luck is about to change.
His pick dislodges something with promise. He sets a stick of dynamite, lights a fuse, and leisurely climbs to the mouth of the hole. There’s an explosion. When the dust settles, Plainview re-enters the mine. A few steps down the makeshift ladder, one rung breaks away and he falls to the bottom. The wind is knocked out of him and his left leg is severely damaged. But Plainview’s attention turns to the prize. With his discovery tucked into this shirt, he hauls himself up and out of the shaft and begins his journey into town, shuttling along on his back using the one good leg to push off.
In the next scene, the miner’s find is being examined in an assayer’s office. Plainview is out of sight. The camera pans to the floor, and there he is, lying on his back, left leg splinted. Clever editing of this scene makes it the first mildly humorous moment in the film. (Light moments like this are offered up grudgingly. This is a serious film, and laughter doesn’t come often.) The simple filmic gesture of panning to Plainview, stretched out on the floor waiting to learn whether he’s found silver, tells us what we need to know about the man: he can endure a great deal of pain if it means he’ll get what he wants.
Time passes. Plainview is in good health and has enjoyed some success as a silver miner. His luck suddenly increases when the mine fills with oil. He hires a small team of laborers and shifts to the oil-drilling business. From now on, the entrepreneur is a self-made “oilman.”
One of the workers has a baby that he keeps close by at the worksite. There are no women around. We aren’t surprised when the baby’s father is accidentally killed in his dangerous occupation. Plainview adopts the child, unofficially.
More time passes. The baby has grown into a young boy. Plainview treats him like a son, calls him “H. W.,” and introduces him as his partner during his business negotiations.
The story takes an important turn when a young man shows up at Plainview’s worksite with a proposition. He wants to sell information he has about oil on California land owned by his family, the Sundays. Plainview makes a deal with the lad and off he goes, with H. W. at his side, to investigate the prospects. The sequence reveals that Daniel Plainview is a man capable of deception and at risk of becoming greedy.
Sure enough, the oilman and his boy discover oil seepage on the Sunday property. Plainview pretends to be fond of hunting quail and offers to buy the property for this purpose. The family patriarch is drawn into a deal, while a younger relative, Eli Sunday, protests. Eli believes he’s been called to be a minister; he wants to build a church for the community of Little Boston, the inconspicuous town near the oil filed. There’s a faint hint of self-importance in his demand for a subsidy, once the well begins to produce. Plainview agrees to assist the young preacher in his venture.
Using the proceeds from his original oil works, Plainview buys up all the oil-rich land in the area. Only one landowner, named Bandy, refuses to sell. (This will surely be important later.) A large compound is constructed and a drill is set up on site. The people of Little Boston celebrate the opening of the well. Plainview manages the site with good sense and determination. H. W. observes the operation closely.
Then one afternoon, the drill breaks through. With a frightful blast, a gusher bursts forth. H. W. is close by. He’s thrown into the air and down onto his back. The editing of this sequence is masterful. You can tell the instant the boy loses his hearing during the explosion. Plainview rushes to the scene and carries the boy to a shack where he examines him for injuries. This sequence is long and methodical; it demonstrates that Plainview regards the boy with deep affection. And yet, within moments the oilman is back at the scene of the gusher, giving orders to contain a fire that has broken out. Though he’s distressed by his son’s loss of hearing, his mind is on the fortune foreshadowed by this event.
There’s much more to the plotline than this, but there’s no need to trace it in detail. Daniel Plainview’s character is revealed little by little. He lets himself get close to a stranger who comes along, claiming to be his half-brother, Henry. One evening, while talking to Henry, Daniel reveals the evil in his own heart. “I hate most people.” “I see the worst in people.” “I don’t like explaining myself.” These are a few notable revelations. He asks Henry, “Are you an angry man?” The question establishes that Plainview is himself an angry man, and that he knows this. He also knows what it can lead to. He seems to understand that his anger will get him into trouble. He wants to succeed, and he doesn’t want anyone else to succeed. His brooding suggests a future of determined solitude and rough dealings with others.
This film’s got religion. But the religious spirit portrayed here is turn-of-the-century funky. Eli Sunday is the preacher who thinks he’s got charisma, for the sensible reason that everyone in town seems to like him and trust him. But we recognize his bravado and we’re turned off by his goofy antics. He seems more possessed of the devil than the people he pretends to heal. He thrives on adulation and influence. To be sure, many religious leaders have succumbed to the seductions of power over others. But Eli has masterminded his “prophetic role” from the beginning. Daniel Plainview is the only one who sees what we see—an imposter. One of Plainview’s great feats—late in the movie—is getting Eli to confess, in mock bravado, “I am a false prophet, and God is a superstition!”
Religion is used by various characters as a tool of manipulation. The preacher is a poseur, and members of the church are uniformly credulous. One of the most memorable scenes occurs in the church built by Eli Sunday. Plainview pretends to confess his sins and seek forgiveness. He does this in order to secure a contract to lease land from Bandy for his oil pipeline. Bandy knows that Plainview has murdered Henry, himself a pretender of a different kind. Bandy is willing to keep the murder a secret and grant Plainview’s wish for a lease. But Plainview must join the church and be baptized. He’s blackmailed into getting religion.
Eli Sunday is a wimpy opportunist and a charlatan. He builds a sanctuary, as if to mimic Plainview’s construction of an oil derrick. Eli calls his church “the Church of the Third Revelation.” This is his theatre for self-aggrandizement. He practices faith healing and casts out demons. People flock to his meetings, sometimes disrupting the work-schedule that Plainview has arranged for his men.
Some viewers will think this film mocks religion in general, and Christianity in particular. But anyone who suspects that most Christians believe and behave like members of the Church of the Third Revelation are as gullible as the simple folk of Little Boston. Reviewer Gary Chew naively describes the Eli character as “a devout, evangelical Christian preacher nurturing a growing congregation.”1 But Chew is mistaken. The religion promoted by Eli is unconventional and artificial. This is so transparent that the admiration bestowed on Eli is truly mystifying. There isn’t a sensible person in the congregation, or in the whole town, for that matter. But this is what makes Eli’s fawning congregation so interesting. Without their acquiescence, Eli would be uninteresting. Out of simple narrative necessity, the good people of Little Boston have to be painted as boobs.
There are two reasons why Plainview sees through—or has a “plain view” of—Eli’s ruse. First, Plainview is a cynic about pretty much everything. More important, he’s a narcissist who hates competition, and senses in Eli a challenge to his own power. For all their differences, Daniel Plainview and Eli Sunday alike are demagogues. Plainview can tell that Eli is a demagogue because Plainview is one, too. One draws strength from heaven; the other sucks it out of the ground. Neither one is a real threat to the other. Still, the two are power-hungry characters, nudging the narrative along with their competitive skirmishes. In this rivalry, it’s “Citizen Kane versus Elmer Gantry.”
This movie doesn’t have a hero. None of the characters is especially appealing or worth emulating. At bottom, Daniel Plainview is a thug, and the preacher is a charlatan whose avarice is equal to Plainview’s. Members of the Church of the Third Revelation are lemmings.2 The only person whose virtues seem to outweigh his vices is H. W. But even as an adult, H. W. is simply innocent and tragic. That’s enough for sympathy, but not for admiration.
So maybe this film is saying something about two sorts of people. Those few who use their talents to improve their image and amass great wealth at the expense of others, and those who are almost willfully exploited. If so, the film is more about the exploiters than the exploited.
There Will Be Blood bears comparison with the outlook of atheist philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900). Consider, for example, Nietzsche’s earliest work, The Birth of Tragedy (1872). Two themes are contrasted, the “Apollonian” and the “Dionysian.” The Dionysian spirit is marked by intoxication with life; the Apollonian orientation is concerned with convention, guided at times by dreams and visions. Nietzsche favored the Dionysian over the Apollonian form of life. In There Will Be Blood, Daniel Plainview is often drinking and braying under the influence of hard liquor. Eli Sunday is the spiritualist, the recipient of special divine guidance. But Eli’s taproot to the supernatural is false, while Plainview’s bluster is very much for real.
Like Nietzsche, There Will Be Blood interprets the human will as the will to power. As I’ve suggested, Daniel and Eli are both demagogues, cultivating power in their respective arenas of activity, and moving toward a final showdown. In Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883-1885), Nietzsche describes the ideal of the Übermensch, often translated as “the Superman.” This figure transcends good and evil, as further described in Nietzsche’s work Beyond Good and Evil (1886). The Superman suffers no inhibitions and is guilt-free. Robert Wicks explains:
Nietzsche . . . challenges the entrenched moral idea that exploitation, domination, injury to the weak, destruction and appropriation are universally objectionable behaviors. Above all, he believes that living things aim to discharge their strength and express their “will to power”—a pouring-out of expansive energy that, quite naturally, can entail danger, pain, lies, deception and masks. 3
Plainview resembles the Superman in these respects. He feels no remorse for his misdeeds. He’s anti-social, determined to be free of dependence on relationships with others. He makes no excuses. And in the end he overpowers Eli.
In the final scene, after killing Eli, Plainview mutters, “I’m finished.” Whether he means that he is in some sense completed, or that he has simply come to the end of his life, is uncertain. But it sounds like a form of philosophical resignation. In the Genealogy of Morals (1887), Nietzsche outlines the manner in which the majority of people submit to a slavish morality, often reinforced by religion, and especially by Christianity. They are the exploited. In There Will Be Blood, members of the Church of the Third Revelation may seem to represent this outlook, and Daniel Plainview’s aloofness from the church could sustain a Nietzschian interpretation of this, indicating Plainview’s superior power.
These reflections are speculative. Screenwriter and director Paul Thomas Anderson may have had completely different intentions. (Is it a coincidence that actor Paul Dano, who plays Eli Sunday in There Will Be Blood, also played the Nietzsche-spouting character, Dwayne, in Little Miss Sunshine? Probably.)
We should recall that the film is based loosely on Upton Sinclair’s novel Oil! published in 1927. Anderson says the first 150 pages of the novel inspired his writing of the screenplay. But it seems that relatively little of the anti-capitalist and pro-socialist ideology of Sinclair’s fiction carries over to the screenplay. There are allusions to the greed of the oil companies and railroads during the 1920s, but Daniel Plainview, an independent tycoon, is the larger-than-life villain in There Will Be Blood. A conception of the common good simply isn’t presented in this film.
Though subtle, this dovetails neatly with the socialist sentiment. Anti-capitalists fret that the common good is threatened by a “free market,” where enterprising individuals compete to supply a product that is in demand, and the demand is a function of what ordinary people need. Ordinary people are exploited and forgotten, while the capitalists compete with each other. In There Will Be Blood, the collection of ordinary people, represented by the citizens of Little Boston and the laborers on Plainview’s oil fields, recede into the background. With the completion of the pipeline, Plainview himself retires in luxury, debauchery, and lonely isolation.
There Will Be Blood is evidently more of an entertainment film than a big idea film. But this is entertainment with a macabre sensibility. It’s painful watching the cruelty of Daniel Plainview. His callous treatment of others is emotionally wrenching. He’s a deeply disturbed individual, and we never really know why. Maybe that explains how we can feel his pain and at the same time suspect that our sympathy toward him is undeserved. It may be a mark of the director’s genius that we feel bludgeoned into emotional numbness as witnesses to Daniel’s relentless physical and verbal abuse of others. It takes real imagination to get viewers to feel like victims of Daniel’s oppression, as we sit in the dark eating popcorn.
This doesn’t mean that you have to be a masochist to find things to enjoy about this film. Daniel Day-Lewis’s performance is stunning. There Will Be Blood has been nominated for an Academy Award for its achievement in cinematography. The cinematography is good, but not because of the natural beauty of the scenery. The land is harsh and unforgiving. The camera angles and focus, the lighting, the color, these are real strengths of the movie. The art direction is also impressive. In comparison with a film like Atonement, though, all this will seem unremarkable.
Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood scored the film. This is further testament to Paul Thomas Anderson’s enthusiasm for the experimental. Edgy and dissonant strings are prominent. This is a unique kind of “mood music.” It reinforces the mysteriousness of the main character and the fever behind his ambition. But the score is not always successful. In one scene, Daniel and Henry are surveying property for a pipeline on land that isn’t theirs. The prolonged screeching is cloying and self-conscious. It’s not clear what emotion it wants to evoke. (Of course, this could be the point.)
The haunt of a violin accompanies the film credits, and lengthens our sense of wastefulness in the lives of Daniel Plainview and the people he touched. (Watch the credits through to the end. One song is said to be performed by the Church of the Third Revelation.)
Often the music of the score is beautiful and moving. But the musical score of a film must synchronize effectively with the film’s progression and mood to qualify as brilliant. Not everyone will agree that Greenwood’s score meets this criterion. Many expected an automatic Oscar nomination in the category of original score. That didn’t happen, but only because of a technicality. Greenwood makes too much use of pre-recorded music, composed by himself, by Johannes Brahms, and by Arvo Pärt.
Pärt (b. 1935) is an apt selection. He’s been called “the shaman of Estonia,” because of his reputation for composing music that has an eerie capacity to heal. His already classic composition called “Frates” (used in the score for There Will Be Blood) yields “a quivering lamentation of rare power,” writes Fred Kirschnit, a classical music reviewer. 4
The film title suggests a measure of violence that doesn’t really materialize. Depictions of accidental deaths aren’t especially gruesome. There are two murders. The first, some would say, is “tastefully done.” It involves a handgun. But you don’t even hear the mortal shot fired, much less see it inflict its damage. The effect is horrifying, but at a deeper emotional level than the merely visceral. You’re made to wonder briefly who was more treacherous, Daniel or Henry.
The second murder involves a bowling pin. If you’ve ever wondered what it sounds like for someone to be bludgeoned to death, this scene will satisfy your curiosity. While the depiction is more graphic this time around, we’re better prepared for what happens. We know that Daniel Plainview is capable of such a thing, and we’d be surprised by a different outcome.
I can’t say I was looking forward to seeing this film. Of the five Academy Award nominees for best picture, I thought I would probably like it least. I saw Atonement first, then Michael Clayton, followed by There Will Be Blood. (I’ll get to No Country for Old Men and Juno next.) The cinematography is best in Atonement; maybe the editing, too. The acting in There Will Be Blood cannot be matched, if we look past the comparatively mediocre performances of supporting actors. George Clooney has been nominated for best leading actor in Michael Clayton. How does his achievement compare with Daniel Day-Lewis’s performance? It doesn’t. Someone might argue that Day-Lewis’s acting is too much of a performance, meaning, his brilliance stands out a little too much, while Clooney’s is more subtly on point. I’m not convinced. It could be argued that Day-Lewis had more challenging material to work with. That is plausible.
So for best actor, Day-Lewis gets my vote. But for best picture, so far I favor Michael Clayton. Maybe I’m just partial to suspense film. I do appreciate how hard it is to create something new and engaging in this genre, and how seldom we see such a film nominated for best picture. Will Juno or No Country for Old Men change my mind? We’ll see.
1. If you’re familiar with themes in the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, consider whether there are strong parallels between Nietzsche’s worldview and There Will Be Blood.
2. What is Daniel Plainview’s philosophy of life? What are his values? What are his deepest beliefs? What does he want out of life? Why?
3. How do things turn out for Daniel, in comparison with his expectations?
4. Does Daniel love H. W. at all during his life? Does he love him even in the end when he speaks as if he doesn’t? If Daniel’s love for the boy is diminished over time, what is the explanation? What does this say about whether Daniel ever really loved H. W.? What evidence supports your answers?
5. Is this an entertainment film? What’s entertaining about it?
6. Is this film a genuine work of art? Explain your answer by presenting evidence from the film.
7. What is violence? How is violence depicted in this film? Is it gratuitous, or is it required to communicate the message of the film? What is your evaluation of the way the violence is depicted in each case? Compare this with other choices the director might have made. Does this film explain how violence emerges in society? Does it say anything about how violence can be turned back?
8. There are occasions when certain characters are threatened with violence by Daniel. For example, Henry is awakened from a drunken stupor with Daniel’s gun aimed at his face. In another instance, a corporate oilman is threatened because he’s implied that Daniel doesn’t take proper care of his son. What happens in each case? How does each man reply? Why does Daniel kill Henry, but not the businessman? Consider the application of the biblical proverb that “a soft answer turns away wrath.” Did this work in one case and not in the other? Explain.
9. Is Eli Sunday supposed to represent the typical evangelical minister? What are the main differences between his religion and mainstream Christianity? Are these differences respected by the film? On what basis would typical viewers associate their opinion of Christianity with its portrayal in the film?
10. How are we supposed to feel about Daniel Plainview? Does Daniel have any admirable traits? If so, what are they?
11. Is Daniel an angry man? Is Daniel a fearful man? If so, what role do these emotions play in his choice of projects and his dealings with people?
12. How is the concept of forgiveness treated in the film? Does Daniel feel a need for forgiveness? Does he ever sincerely seek forgiveness? If you think he doesn’t, what kind of transformation might he have experienced if he had sought forgiveness? And what prevented Daniel, who acknowledged his evil thoughts and actions, from seeking forgiveness?
13. When Daniel confronts Henry about his lie, Henry knows that Daniel is tempted to kill him. He tries to convince Daniel that they are friends. Does Henry have a legitimate basis for saying this? What does this film say about friendship? Does Daniel have any friends? Explain. How do you think Daniel feels after killing Henry?
14. What does this film say about the basis of respect for and trust toward other people?
15. Does this film seek to communicate a specific message? Explain and provide evidence for your answer.
16. If you’ve seen other films that have been nominated for best picture in the 80th Annual Academy Awards, how would you rank this film? What criteria have you used? Why do you think these are the criteria to use in selecting the best motion picture?
17. How would you compare Daniel Day-Lewis’s performance in this film with other roles he’s played?
18. What other films have been directed by Paul Thomas Anderson? (You can find this information at www.imdb.com.) Have you seen any of his other films? How would you compare them with There Will Be Blood?
19. Listen to the music of Arvo Pärt (specifically, his composition called “Frates”), and reflect on its suitability for the film’s soundtrack. How does it inform your understanding of the mood and message of the film? The complete composition lasts nearly ten minutes. How much of the piece is used by Jonny Greenwood in the musical score for There Will Be Blood? What can you learn from this about Greenwood’s goals while scoring this film?