A partial analysis of There Will Be Blood

Rating: 10/10 (19 May 2015)

Paul Thomas Anderson's film "There Will Be Blood" has a lot to offer for filmmakers looking to improve their craft. Even after 5 views over the last year, I still don't think I have a handle on everything this film has to offer. We all know Daniel Day-Lewis won an Academy Award for his performance as Daniel Plainview, an "oil man" hell-bent on striking oil and ensuring the failure of his competitors. It also won awards for it's original score and phenomenal sound design. I'm not going to review this film from a critic's standpoint but rather I am going to dissect it and find out all I can to make me a better filmmaker.
The film opens with a wide-angle shot of the desert accompanied by a sinister tone that lets us know this "world" is an unfriendly and dangerous world. This is California, 1898, Anderson makes us curious about a man who is in a deep well chipping away at the bedrock. Why is he alone? What is he looking for? Subconsciously we ask these questions to ourselves and this pulls us in deeper into the world of the play. What are the rules of this world? This is an unsafe world, it is a sinister world where friends are hard to come by. It is a dirty, dry world. Nobody is clean, everybody is guilty of something on some level. This is a hostile world.
The use of dynamite and the subsequent explosion are major "plantings" which will be paid off later. Plainview breaks his leg and manages to pull himself and as we soon learn he drags himself all the way back to town (Quentin Tarantino commented on this as a brilliant use of "ellipses", meaning we are told something vastly important without the filmmaker needing to show us i.e. Daniel Plainview made it all the way back to town, crawling, and that tells us we are dealing with someone whose determination transcends that of most people). The sequence comes to a close with a return to the beginning wide shot of the desert and we are reminded that this world is unsafe and sinister through the use of sound.
In the next sequence we are introduced again to the main character by seeing his name being written "Daniel Plainview". Again this creates curiosity in us, we are still yet to see him close up and we are still making assumptions and decisions about this man. Anderson was brilliant in making oil seem like a character in its own right. All these human-beings are servants to it. It's like the wicked king that rules with an iron fist and shows mercy to know one (more on this theme later). This is where the brilliant use of sound comes in. The machinery is accompanied by a low tone which creates a feeling of drudgery and danger...as if something bad is about to happen (think Jaws). Brilliantly, Anderson places a rope being lowered into the ground, it looks just like a noose, and is a simple foreshadow that something bad is indeed about to happen. The rope was not placed where it was and found itself in the final cut of the film for no reason. A man is killed and we are introduced to his baby, whom Daniel adopts and names him H.W. One of the major plantings of the film happens here. H.W. is sitting in a basket as Daniel stares at him hesitantly. In our progression of cathexis with the main character, we begin to have a more positive feeling towards him because look, he's taking that child under his wing, he has some redeemable qualities about him. Our cathexis with the character at this point has some negative and some positive. Who is the main Character? It is Daniel Plainview.