I love Paul Thomas Anderson.

Rating: 10/10 (28 October 2014)

I'm still in awe of this film. Just as The Master was a thoroughly involving character piece with a sado-masochistic drive, so too is There Will Be Blood, but with a stronger, more apparent narrative-drive that burns us up with more velocity, that leaves us immediately knowing we've been hit. Perhaps that's why people preferred this to The Master. That isn't to say this is less-subtle though. This is Anderson being Kubrickian in his cinematic ventures, letting the film unfold meticulously whilst planting seeds in your mind - seeds that don't grow with the film feeding them, but with you puzzling over them.
The sado-masochism affects the characters as much as it does the viewer. Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) And Eli Sunday (Paul Dano) both voraciously feed and rely on substances that are easily exploitative yet are limited in their availability: Oil, yes, and the pain and gullibility of people who are waiting to answer to leaders like Plainview and Sunday. So their sadistic drive that allows them to take advantage of people is counter-balanced by the masochism of not being able to fulfil their greed and ambition, and we the audience who witness this epic narrative are delightfully tortured by the malice we witness, yet we begin to thrive on the destruction of the two characters, at least to a perceptible degree, because it is too fascinating not to.
And all these themes and ideas are explored subtly within the two-and- a-half-plus hours that I'm merely scratching the surface. I've presented the broad, vague ideas, but to crack them open would be like to endlessly try to reach the smallest Russian Doll; I don't think I could ever achieve some completely final and conclusive state of mind in regards to this film, I could never be satisfied and put it aside. And that in itself is satisfying.
The opening sequence is a master-stroke in establishing character and setting. Before we even get the opening title-card, the score (written and composed absolutely beautifully by Jonny Greenwood, of Radiohead fame) begins to rattle portentously until we are engulfed by an ominous drone. The location, a vast empty desert, is void of any life, except for Daniel Plainview, who laboriously mines away underground. It is just him and us.
And then he finds what he was looking for: Silver. Before he can gather his tools and his treasure and safely leave, he falls back down the mine on attempting to climb it. The narrative has already cornered itself in the first 10 minutes, but rather than a simply deus-ex-machina, we get an extraordinary feat of character in which Plainview drags himself the many miles (we're never quite sure how many, it's some unthinkable distance) back to town, with the silver safely in pocket. This has surely won the audience's admiration, for at this point in knowing almost nothing about this character, we want to know what drives him. Oh, how we'll regret this.
Still the film offers no dialogue, as we now see Plainview and a drilling crew who happen upon a mighty gush of Oil. An ominous drone, a worker's death and an adopted son later, and Plainview has begun his violent downward trajectory. The opening has been compared to The Dawn of Man prologue in 2001, and this would be quite accurate. Both offer glimpses into the beginnings of a drastic evolution; the bone wielded by the apes which subsequently allows them to assert enough power to become Mankind and dominate the natural world is like Plainview's piece of silver which allows all else to proceed. The Oil Derricks stand like mighty monoliths, always urging Plainview further into his descent.
One of the only times Daniel Plainview smiles is upon discovering his wealth of oil. His character is the antithesis of friendly; he offers no personal insight into his life, and whenever conversation heads in this direction, he sharply reprimands the other person. The adopted son H.W (Dillon Freasier) is used to create a welcoming faÃ§ade for this oil business, and Plainview is thus a 'family man'. He scuttles when he walks, like some twisted creature risen from the sea, and he is always brash and breathy, like he's impatiently waiting to move on to the next machination of his business. He doesn't even try to be subtle in his manipulations, rather he relies on rather domineering tactics, and he is never less than frightening and repulsive.
So how does Paul Dano hold himself alongside Daniel Day-Lewis? Magnificently. People seem to approach his performance with a scepticism almost in the same manner Adam Sandler received in Punch- Drunk Love. Dano is of course the better actor, but PTA uses his features and general demeanour to the advantage of the film as he did with Sandler. His benign and jelly-like face, with his young, weedy frame merge with the brash petulance of his character, a boy becoming a man who begins to domineer much in the way Plainview does. Except Eli Sunday is too naive, and in the final moments of the film I couldn't help but feel sympathetic. A life-long hatred is borne between the two characters that drives them as much as anything else, and I wonder if it was Sunday's ignorant competitiveness that caused his downfall. The (brilliant) poster suggests a conflict, or a marriage of religion and capitalism, and in the end we realise the two pursuits of these characters could have mutually benefited each other.
A friend described each frame of this film as like an oil painting, and that is entirely true. The cinematography captures the emptiness of the desert and these people's lives, and shows how PTA has eschewed the more lively style of his earlier work for something slower and (even more) precise.