There Will Be Blood

There Will Be Blood, American period drama film released in 2007 that was written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson and is loosely based on the first 150 pages of Upton Sinclair’s 1927 novel Oil! The film stars Daniel Day-Lewis as silver prospector-turned-oilman Daniel Plainview, who relentlessly pursues profit amid the late 19th- and early 20th-century southern California oil boom. It is widely regarded as one of the best films of the early 21st century.

Premise and summary

In 1898 Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) discovers silver while prospecting in New Mexico. He breaks his leg while attempting to extract the silver and is forced to drag himself into town to get the paperwork confirming his land claim. A few years later Plainview discovers oil and establishes his own drilling company. When one of his employees is killed in an oil well because of an accident, Plainview adopts the man’s infant son, whom he names H.W.

As his drilling concern expands, Plainview and young H.W. (Dillon Freasier) travel the country, attempting to win leases to drill on land where oil has been discovered. Plainview presents H.W. as his partner and his business as a family venture in order to gain landowners’ trust. In 1911 a young man named Paul Sunday (Paul Dano) sells Plainview information about the location of his family farm in Little Boston, California, where Sunday says oil has been discovered. Plainview and H.W. visit the farm, pretending to be hunting quail, and arrange to buy the land from family patriarch Abel Sunday (David Willis). They also meet Eli Sunday (also played by Dano), Paul’s identical twin brother, who is the leader of a local congregation, the Church of the Third Revelation. As part of the land deal, Plainview promises Eli a several-thousand-dollar donation to his church and proceeds to buy up all the surrounding land except for the plot owned by a man named William Bandy (Hans Howes), with whom Plainview declines to negotiate.

Plainview amasses enough resources and workers to construct an oil derrick in Little Boston. Plainview denies Eli’s request to bless the well at the ceremony marking the start of drilling. Shortly after oil production begins, a worker is killed, and H.W. is deafened in a gas blowout that leads to a large fire. Eli blames the mishaps on Plainview’s decision to block the pastor’s blessing and demands the promised donation to his church. Plainview responds by beating and humiliating the Eli.

Then a stranger appears in Little Boston, claiming to be Plainview’s previously unknown half brother, Henry, and asking for a job. Plainview is suspicious but ultimately welcomes Henry. H.W. acts out as he attempts to adjust to the loss of his hearing and to his father’s new connection to Henry, and Plainview deceptively sends H.W. away to San Francisco to attend a school for Deaf children.

At a meeting with representatives from Standard Oil, Plainview rejects their offer to buy out his operation after a perceived slight and announces his plans to partner with rival Union Oil to build a pipeline carrying his oil to the coast. The pipeline construction is stymied by the need to use Bandy’s land, which Plainview never purchased.

Plainview becomes suspicious of Henry after he misses a reference to the town in which they grew up. One night while camping outside Bandy’s land, Henry admits to Plainview that he has been impersonating Plainview’s half brother, whom he knew but who has since died of tuberculosis. Plainview kills the imposter and buries him. In the morning, Plainview is awoken by Bandy, who indicates that he knows what happened the previous night and tells Plainview that he will sell his land to the oilman if Plainview gets baptized at Eli’s church. Plainview submits to a humiliating baptism at the Church of the Third Revelation, during which Eli screams at and slaps him and demands that he loudly admit to abandoning his son, which Plainview does.

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With the completion of the pipeline, Plainview becomes wealthy, but he is also increasingly resentful, paranoid, and dependent on alcohol. By 1927 an adult H.W. (Russell Harvard) has married Mary Sunday (Colleen Foy), a younger sister of Paul and Eli. He visits Plainview’s mansion to let the oilman know of his intention to dissolve their business partnership and start his own drilling company in Mexico. When an enraged Plainview reveals for the first time that H.W. is not his biological child, H.W. tells Plainview he is glad they are not blood relatives and leaves.

A few years later Eli visits Plainview, who is alone, drunkenly eating dinner on the floor of his in-home bowling alley. Eli offers him drilling rights to the last remaining plot in Little Boston, which Eli thinks are valuable but Plainview knows to be worthless. Plainview says he will buy the land if Eli denounces his faith and admits to being a fraud, which Eli does after goading from Plainview. Then Plainview reveals that he has no further need for land in Little Boston, because he has already extracted all the oil through neighboring wells. Eli admits to being in dire financial straits, and Plainview taunts him and chases him around the bowling alley before murdering him with a bowling pin. When Plainview’s butler arrives to investigate the commotion and finds Eli bleeding out on the floor, Plainview says simply, “I’m finished.”

Development and production

Writer and director Anderson sought the film rights to Sinclair’s Oil! after he realized that the novel provided a good backdrop for a screenplay about two warring families that he was struggling to complete. In a 2007 interview with The Sunday Times, producer JoAnne Sellar discussed the difficulties in securing financial backing for the film:

We did it on an incredibly small amount of money, though it was more than the average for an art film. The studios didn’t think it had the scope of a major picture.

Striking elements of the film’s design include its unsettling score and spare cinematography. Guitarist Jonny Greenwood of the British rock band Radiohead produced the film’s instrumental score, which uses traditional orchestral sounds to create a sinister sense of foreboding, such as wailing strings that sound like an air-raid siren and unnerving percussion rhythms. The film’s widely praised cinematography is characterized by static wide views and shots that last much longer than the average for most 21st-century films. There is no dialogue in the film’s first 14 and a half minutes.

Reception

The film garnered both critical and commercial success. Multiple critics listed There Will Be Blood among their top films from both 2007 and the first decade of the 21st century. Day-Lewis won widespread acclaim for his performance as Plainview. The film was nominated for eight Academy Awards, including for best picture, best direction, and best adapted screenplay, and it won two awards, for best actor (Day-Lewis) and best cinematography. The film grossed more than $76 million worldwide on a $25 million budget.