There Will Be Blood

A film that begins in 1898 and is set in California. The opening is silent for fifteen minutes. A man is prospecting for silver alone in a shaft, falls, breaks his leg and crawls down to town. Daniel Plainview then moves to oil. He builds a small crew and takes in the baby of a worker killed in an accident. He takes the child everywhere. Having his son with him makes things easier when he goes to landowners. A young man comes and tells him about a place. There is oil at the town and he wants money for it. From there the film is a story of building. Buying land, a derrick, a fire, a pipeline and a church. Eli is opposite him. A young preacher who wants to grow his own church; the two men want the same people in the same town. What the narrative is interested in is not oil but enmity: Plainview loves nobody and says so once outright, and all the feeling in the film gathers around that sentence. The line with the son is the breaking point. An accident leaves the boy deaf and the father starts carrying him like a weight. The last scene takes place in a bowling alley and is the most discussed part of the film. The music is by Jonny Greenwood; the strings are deliberately uncomfortable and do not match the image in some scenes. It was shot in Marfa, in Texas, where another crew was working in the same period. The source is a novel by Upton Sinclair, though the film departs from it considerably. Daniel Day-Lewis won an Academy Award for the part; the film also won for cinematography. Daniel Day-Lewis, Paul Dano, Kevin J. O'Connor and Dillon Freasier are in the cast. Paul Thomas Anderson wrote and directed. Who it is for: anyone who likes heavy, quiet films built on one character. Who it is not for: anyone looking for sympathy; the narrative rescues nobody.