A Symbol of Heroic Evil

Rating: 9/10 (14 March 2008)

"There Will Be Blood" is based on one of the classic themes of the cinema- indeed, one of the classic themes of all drama- the rise and fall of a great man. Perhaps the greatest cinematic treatment of this theme is "Citizen Kane", and as in Welles's masterpiece the great man in this film is not a king, statesman or general but a business tycoon, and his "fall" involves a decline in his moral character rather than a reversal of his financial fortunes. The title may have been chosen to reflect Shakespeare's "blood will have blood"- a line from "Macbeth", a play about another man who achieves temporal power at a terrible cost to his soul.
The film is set in the American West in the closing years of the nineteenth century and the first three decades of the twentieth. In 1898 Daniel Plainview is a silver prospector in New Mexico who, by accident, strikes oil. This lucky discovery enables him to become a relatively prosperous oilman, but he is to achieve far greater wealth when a young man named Paul Sunday offers him information about a vast reservoir of oil. This turns out to lie in Little Boston, California, beneath land owned by Paul's elderly father Abel. With the assistance of Paul's information, Plainview is able to buy the land from Abel, who is ignorant of its true worth, and to become one of America's wealthiest oil tycoons.
The rest of the film is too complex for me to attempt any sort of synopsis. There are, however, two major themes running through it. One of those is that of the family. Plainview, who has acquired great wealth through Paul's willingness to betray his family, is fated never to achieve happiness in his own family relationships. He never marries, but adopts as his son a young boy named HW. (We never find out what those initials stand for). When Plainview strikes oil at Little Boston, the escaping gases cause an explosion in which HW is deafened. The boy, left permanently deaf, is sent away to a special boarding school and becomes estranged from his father. Later a man comes into Plainview's life claiming to be his long-lost brother Henry; Plainview originally believes him and takes him into his business, but when he discovers that the supposed "Henry" is in fact an impostor, kills him.
The second theme is that of religion. The film can be regarded as an exploration of the Biblical theme of "What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his soul?" Plainview's great adversary is not a business rival but Eli Sunday, Paul's brother and the pastor of a local church. Plainview is not a religious man- his only god is Mammon- but agrees to be baptised as a member of Eli's church in order to purchase from another member of the congregation a piece of land which he needs desperately. Eli, who has a long-standing grudge against Plainview, takes the opportunity to humiliate him by forcing him to make a public avowal of his sins, including his abandonment of HW. For all his fire-and-brimstone fundamentalism, Eli has worldly ambitions of his own, and needs money to build up his church. The film's climax comes when he is forced to ask Plainview for financial assistance, which the tycoon sees as an opportunity to avenge his own humiliation many years before.
2008 will go down in history as the year when the two major contenders for the "Best Picture" Oscar were both in the Western tradition. The award eventually went to "No Country for Old Men", which can be regarded as a modern day Western along the lines of "Bad Day at Black Rock" or "Lonely are the Brave", but of the two I greatly preferred "There Will Be Blood". "No CountryÂ….." has its virtues, especially a great performance from Tommy Lee Jones, but overall I found that film too emotionally cold, and certainly not the Coen Brothers' masterpiece, as some have hailed it.
"There Will Be Blood", by contrast is a magnificent epic, beautifully photographed, with two great performances at its heart. One is from Paul Dano, who plays the dual roles of Paul and Eli Sunday. (He was originally cast only as Paul, but took over the larger role of Eli when the actor playing it dropped out; the script was altered to make the brothers identical twins). Eli is the sort of hypocritical, sanctimonious preacher who sees religion as a path to worldly success and power over others; in the early days he may possess a small kernel of genuine religious faith, but by the end of the film he is as materialistic as Plainview himself, happy to proclaim God a superstition and himself a false prophet in the hope of financial advantage.
The other great performance, of course, is from Daniel Day-Lewis. Like Sunday, Plainview is a man who possesses some genuine qualities, such as courage and determination (shown in the lengthy, wordless opening scene where he manages to extricate himself from the silver mine after breaking a leg), but he quickly becomes corrupted by greed. Despite his good fortune in material terms, his life is an unhappy, loveless, sterile one, dominated by his bad qualities, not just greed and avarice, but also envy, resentment and a bitter hatred of the rest of the human race. As he says: "I have a competition in me. I want no one else to succeed. I hate most people". And yet, for all Plainview's faults, Day-Lewis makes him a titanic figure of epic grandeur- a symbol, like Milton's Satan, of heroic evil. At times he becomes almost pitiable. Together with the very different "My Left Foot", for which he won his first "Best Actor" award, this is Day-Lewis's greatest film. His second Oscar is well deserved. 9/10