There Will Be Blood: A Magnum Opus of Madness and Greed

One of the most impressive things about Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood is how it manages to be at once sparse and overwhelming, restrained and ferocious. The wind-swept California desert is sparse in the sense that it is barren, and barren in the sense that it serves as a meaningful, blank-facedly hostile backdrop to what this film really cares about: its complex, monumentally acted characters. These characters are restrained in that they don't wield visual gimmicks or spectacular special effects, but they are ferocious, no "in that" to it. There is both a fear and a tragedy in seeing these ferocious yet empathetic people dragged into the depths of depravity by the trials and temptations of life, and when there's as much money to be made on oil as there is, the devil is busy.

We live in a world that preaches empathy one moment and defaults to condemnation the next, partly because we lack self-awareness and partly because anger is a drug. There Will Be Blood, a loose adaptation of Upton Sinclair's novel Oil!, rises above this performativeness and reactionism with its subtle subtext about how greed can corrupt good men, and because it treats Daniel Plainview fairly, refusing to observe him from a distance, seeing him get corrupted by greed feels less like a cautionary tale of a monster we're supposed to hate, and more like losing a friend. The remaining cast's brilliant acting brings the rest of these complex, refreshingly old-fashioned characters ripped from the pages of a classic novel to life. Paul Dano's dual performances as twin brothers Paul and Eli are excellent, with preacher Eli's fire-and-brimstone sermons being nothing short of goosebump-inducing. However, Daniel Day-Lewis's performance as Plainview is the utterly unforgettable centerpiece of the entire ordeal, a subtle and tragic portrait of a man with the weight of the world hidden poorly behind his eyes.

This movie is about horrible and yet strangely relatable people who are so good at using others that you may find yourself preferring being deceived over admitting their immorality. I'd go so far as to call There Will Be Blood a horror movie, though not in the sense you'd expect. Seeing a good man like Daniel fall into such a pit of depravity is horrifying in a way actual horror movies can't match, a horror rivaled only by the tragic realization that Daniel knows he's falling into this pit. This is an unhurried movie, but not an unpredictable one; that's the point. You're supposed to have an idea of what's going to happen to Daniel so that you can hope against hope that he'll somehow avoid a fate worse than death.

The slow, contemplative pace of There Will Be Blood complements its larger ambitions perfectly. This film is in no hurry to be anywhere other than where it is in the moment. We, as the audience, are allowed to exist and soak in these characters and their emotions, a true privilege that only grows more impactful the more we get to know about them. Anderson puts the special effects in the back seat and allows his characters to do the driving, which they're more than capable of. This is a tragic movie, and its minimalism makes it pinpointedly affecting.

This is also a methodical, ambient movie, a series of emotions and concerns being flipped over one after another like cards on a table until...BANG. Something goes wrong, someone gets hurt, and the romanticism of the Wild West is shattered once again. Jonny Greenwood's score perfectly accompanies this minimalism. It's dark and atmospheric, a menacing drone that strikes a perfect balance between ambience and genuine musicality. There Will Be Blood is an overwhelming movie, an All-American epic of madness and greed, but one of the most amazing things about it is that, between its sparing brashness and surprising quiet, it's never forcing itself to be.

This is a complex drama about terrible people coming together to either agree in their folly or stab each other in the back, and by the time the credits roll, all of these people get what is coming to them in their own way. There will indeed be blood, and my response to all of this was precisely what this movie was hoping to stir in me, and what I hope it stirs in you: occasionally ambivalent shock, but not necessarily surprise. This movie is draining in a way that feels rewarding. It is a gigantic visual spectacle of a turn-of-the-century America obsessed with the latest economic commodity, yet it never loses touch with the inner lives of the people pulling the strings. This is one of the greatest character dramas I've seen on either side of the 21st century, and it feels truly timeless in part because it had the mindfulness to avoid the filmmaking tropes of the mid-2000s.

There Will Be Blood knew it would age, so it wisely forewent cliches that would age with it. It succeeds because of its restraint and its willingness to cling to timeless truths, truths like the love of a father for his son and the consequences of loving something else more. This movie's larger idea is that the rubber meets the road where the love of family ends and the love of money begins. It's intimate enough to be relatable, and yet unhinged enough to stay entertaining. It works as a drama, a character study, a piece of art, and even as mere entertainment, and just as it has held audiences spellbound for almost twenty years, I don't see it slowing down for the next twenty, either.

The word timeless is applied too liberally by modern reviewers. But There Will Be Blood fits the bill in more ways than one. If I didn't know this movie was released in 2007, I couldn't have told you what year it was from. Its love for cinema is evident, and its visual and thematic inspirations are both familiar and yet used to create something that feels entirely new.

Another word reviewers use too loosely is masterpiece. However, there's a time and a place for everything, and I think that this is it.

There Will Be Blood - 10/10

James 5:1-6