The most flamboyant portrayal of materialism and its alienating effect ...

Rating: 10/10 (22 March 2011)

It's about expansion, it's about capitalism, and whatever that caused the demise of the Wild West myth. "There Will be Blood" looks, smell, feels like a Western but this is an Anti-Western more than anything
There's so much to say about this movie but it left me speechless at the end, Daniel Day-Lewis was hypnotic, giving a performance that reminded me of Orson Welles in "Citizen Kane", and Humphrey Bogart in "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre" ... He's definitely one of the greatest actors of his generation, especially in this performance that probably best defines the alienating effect of materialism. The 40's had Charles Foster Kane, the 80's had Gordon Gekko and the 2000's have Daniel Planview.
Indeed, "There Will be Blood" is not your typical 'soul corrupted by money and/or power' drama, as I said, it's all about materialism, ending with a pocket filled by gold and a heart made of the same stone you've been working on all your life, it's trusting anything that has a specific color, a specific smell, working on a land to find a greasy black liquid gushing from its womb, and never, never trusting or giving any credit to "nothingness" or "abstraction".
Daniel Plainview considers these abstractions with the most profound disdain. Nothing is free, nothing comes from nothing, nothing is unsubstantial. If one claims to be your brother, he has to prove it, if one should make a deal with you, he should talk business and not about education ... not because it's personal, not because it has nothing to do with business, BUT because it is NOTHING and nothingness irritates Plainview as if the only thing he could believe on had to be material. The rest is nothing, feelings are nothing, believing is nothing, these so strong and noble words for us, well, Plainview doesn't give a damn about them...
And more than anything, above all these abstractions, there is religion, God is Daniel Plainview's archenemy  this is the ultimate masquerade for him, the cancer that gangrenes the progress, an evil that transforms people into sheep, almost like animals, the biggest hypocrisy of all  Plainview, the capitalist, almost shares the same opinion than Marx who thought religion was people's opium. And because Plainview despises this hypocrisy, he tries to exorcise his hatred by using religion to achieve his plans, exploiting it, like he exploited his adopted son. No feelings, no sentiments, everything should serve a palpable purpose. The end justifies the means.
And ultimately, he gets rich at the end, he's a respected and feared tycoon, as the purest and most implacable illustration of the American dream. But is he happy? no! because power, prosperity, those are still empty words ... he believes in material, in things, in stuff he drinks like the iconic 'milk-shake' metaphor that still resonates in my mind as one of the most memorable hymns to greed and pragmatism. Plainview is greedy, but not evil, evil is still too abstract a word; because it implies the use of one own conscience while Plainview's conscience was dedicated to one goal: getting bigger, possession, expansion, territoriality.
And are we to blame him? Let's not forget the bleak cinematography at the beginning of the film where we could feel, the stink of the oil, the hardness of the rocks and the land as an incontrollable enemy ... let's not forget that Plainview spent half of his life stuck alone into dark holes made of land, stone, metal, oil, and raw matter, so close he could almost feel them, so close it became a part of him ...
"There Will Be Blood" is the quintessential film about materialism and its alienating power, when all that matters is matter!