A True Classic

Rating: 9/10 (25 February 2008)

Like many great movies, There Will Be Blood continually brings to mind other works without losing any of its distinctive qualities. I thought first of Black Snake Moan, released in late 2006, because of the intensity of the acting. Where Samuel Jackson in Black Snake Moan is powerful and impressive, Daniel Day-Lewis is entirely overwhelming. His work is on a par with the best of Lawrence Olivier and Marlon Brando. In his role as an ambitious American oil man of the early twentieth century, the British theatrical acting tradition meets American method acting with breathtaking results.
Additional comparisons can be made with Erich Von Stroheim's Greed (as well as with McTeague, the Frank Norris novel on which Greed is based) and Citizen Kane. The nine-hour length of the original version of Greed may have been one reason why Paul Thomas Anderson, the screenwriter and director of There Will Be Blood, chose to use no more than the first hundred or so pages of Upton Sinclair's Oil! for his movie. The very literal interpretation that Von Stroheim applied to Norris's novel led to the movie's extreme length and was cut to a little over two hours for commercial distribution.
There Will be Blood resembles both Greed and Citizen Kane in its focus on the inescapable madness of self-made men. Ross Perot and Howard Hughes are real-life examples of men who fill the archetype. All three movie protagonists are extremely ambitious and become wealthy during the course of the films. In all cases, the results of their ambitions are disastrous. In terms of symbolic meanings, the films' final scenes are remarkably similar: the fight to the death in the desert in Greed, the decaying castle in Citizen Kane, and the murderous bowling alley rampage in There Will be Blood.
But the primary work with which There Will Be Blood requires comparison is Upton Sinclair's novel. There Will Be Blood adheres closely to the initial pages of Oil!. Some of oil man Daniel Plainview's (his name in the novel is J. Arnold Ross) ingratiating speeches to the small farmers from whom he wants to buy cheap land for oil exploration are taken directly from the novel. Throughout the book, the primary character is the oil man's son, Bunny. In the movie, he's called HW, even as an infant, and plays an important but not a leading role.
As the story develops, the book and movie take quite different paths. Oil! becomes a socialist Entwickungsroman, with the son deeply conflicted between his role as an up-and-coming oil magnate and his growing disillusionment with the governmental and corporate establishments. The father fades into the background as social and economic issues inspired by the World War I and the Russian Revolution come to the fore.
In the movie, HW is injured in a drilling accident and becomes deaf. Eventually, he learns sign language and weds Mary, the daughter of a preacher from whom Plainview has purchased land. The father disowns his son when HW wants to go to Mexico and look for oil on his own. There's also a continuing rivalry between Plainview and Eli, Mary's evangelist brother. The men have similar charismatic talents though Plainview has no use for religion except when he can use it to manipulate others. The struggle ends when the old and alcoholic Plainview, living alone in his mansion, forces Eli to renounce his God and bludgeons him to death with pins from his bowling alley.
Despite the murkiness of the film's last half hour and the incongruity of its final violence, it is a cinema masterpiece. Far more than Sinclair's educational and somewhat stilted narratives on history and economics, There Will Be Blood tells viscerally just what it is that unfettered capitalism does to people. But it's psychodrama rather than agitprop. Its spirit is more Norris than Sinclair.