Anderson's best film since Hard Eight

Rating: 9/10 (8 July 2008)

If many of the comments here are to be believed then "There Will Be Blood" is an over-long and purposeless mess, but in fact nothing could be further from the truth. The story of Daniel Plainview's rise to power as an oil magnate in the early part of the 20th Century and his running conflict with the tub-thumping preacher Eli Sunday is a timely and incisive examination of one of the battle's that lie at the heart of modern America and exerts a strong influence to this day over the way that nation shapes both itself and the world around it. Essentially what the film examines is the battle between capitalism and the church for influence and power. Plainview represents the oil industry/capitalism and the obsessive greed and Darwinian competition that drives that system. His name is in fact at odds with his personality. On the surface he certainly seems a reasonable - even charming man - who tells it the way it is, but this masks the fact that he is actually little more than driven sociopath and exploiter of both his workers and the penniless farmers he buys his oil rich land from. He is motivated not by a regard for people (whom he admits to his "brother" he hates) or even family (his own son is discarded when his deafness undermines his usefulness and the arrival of Plainview's brother seems to provide a more viable familial substitute) - instead it is the desire to succeed and make money at the expense of others that really drives him. Indeed when offered a the chance to become a millionaire by speculators who wish to buy his operation Plainview refuses because he would not know what to do if he did not have his business to run. The search for profit is for him an existential issue - the thing that makes him what he is - and yet his inability to see any use beyond his business for that profit hints at a kind of built in madness in his brand of capitalism/the American Dream - an ultimate lack of deeper purpose bound to lead to pain and self destruction. In the hands of men like Plainview big business is a ravening beast caught in a blind and vicious circle of consumption, exploitation and expansion.
On some levels the film's title seems to refer to the inevitability of this man (and the system he symbolises) committing horrible acts of violence. Certainly Day-Lewis presents Plainview as a man constantly struggling with his own psychopathic tendencies - his performance is run through with a terrifying undercurrent of violence and rage which seems to bubble just beneath the surface. The main question in the audience's mind here is not whether this man will become a killer, but when this will happen. Indeed, the film's ending confirms this by offering closure at the point that Plainview brutally murders Eli Sunday with bowling paraphernalia - his and the film's final line being "I'm, finished." Like the title it is a loaded phrase - Plainview's/Anderson's narrative is at an end, Plainview's life may well be over when the murder is discovered, but perhaps most significantly the line hints at the idea that Plainview is now completed - has finished his journey by becoming the brutal killer that he has threatened to be throughout the film.
Of course if one looks beyond the surface character then the film offers a wealth of less than flattering commentary on the nature of the capitalist system Plainview embodies. Through the character a portrait is painted of an utterly brutal and self-serving system which sacrifices humanity for cold hard cash - and as such is itself sociopathic and utterly lost in moral terms.
The church fares little better through its representative - Eli Sunday whose crazed rantings before his congregation of desperate and poverty stricken parishioners do little to endear him to the audience. He is also depicted as utterly greedy and exploitative himself. Throughout the film he seeks to use his connections with Plainview as a way to extract money from him - ostensibly for his church but, we feel, really for him. Indeed it is this greed - the sense that in fact the Christian church in the US is itself more motivated by devotion to Mamon than Christ - which ultimately leads to Sunday's demise at the hands of Plainview as he returns to the oil magnate in an attempt to wring more money from him and get him to pay up for the $5000 which Plainview has owed him for what must be decades. The film's bleak ending leaves us with the sense that if anyone has won the battle at the heart of the film (America) it is capitalism, but in the process it has become difficult to distinguish business from church. Both seem motivated by greed are led by mad men and operate on a kind of blind faith which has resulted in them completely losing their way in human terms.
Given we live in a world where oil and religion are two of the biggest forces shaping our world (and hardly for the better given current realities) "There Will Be Blood" has to be one of the most relevant films around.