There Will Be Blood
There’s a reason Daniel Day-Lewis is the only three-time winner of the Oscar for Best Actor
Directed By: Paul Thomas Anderson
Other Notable Films From Paul Thomas Anderson: Boogie Nights, Phantom Thread, One Battle After Another
Starring: Daniel Day-Lewis, Paul Dano, Paul F. Tompkins
Screenplay By: Paul Thomas Anderson
Movie Synopsis: A man goes mad (and becomes exceedingly rich) during California’s early 20th century oil boom.
Signature Line: “I drink your milkshake.”
THE INTRODUCTION
An accounting of time, and people, and context
Most often in the introductory space here, I’ll settle into a specific theme or idea to be explored with regard to whatever movie it is we’re covering.
The introduction for the Kill Bill essay, for example, was all about how that film established Quentin Tarantino movies as a style unto themselves. The Jurassic Park essay, meanwhile, started with a discussion of Steven Spielberg’s unique ability to leverage an audience’s imagination against them. And The Purge essay opened by explaining how an offhand comment from James DeMonaco’s wife led to a horror movie franchise that eventually pulled in over half a billion dollars at the box office.
Deciding on each movie’s theme or idea is generally a fairly easy part of the process. But that wasn’t the case with There Will Be Blood. There were just too many offshoots I wanted to hit:
I wanted to talk about how the movie marked the first major transition in Paul Thomas Anderson’s career (if I may oversimplify for a second, the first four movies of PTA’s filmography were his Robert Altman era; There Will Be Blood signified him entering his Stanley Kubrick era). And I wanted to talk about the dueling legacies of There Will Be Blood and No Country for Old Men, two movies that were pitted against each other immediately when they were released within a month of each other back in 2007 and continue to be pitted together against each other today. (People are still arguing about whether or not NCFOM deserved to beat out TWBB for Best Picture at the Oscars). And I wanted to talk about the way everything that Paul Thomas Anderson did before There Will Be Blood led to him actually being able to make the movie (my favorite bit of destiny: When PTA released the idiosyncratic rom-com Punch-Drunk Love in 2002, it was widely dismissed as a flop; but Daniel Day-Lewis loved it, which is why he signed on to star in TWBB).
And I wanted to talk about DDL’s soaring performance as Daniel Plainview, and Robert Elswit’s gorgeous cinematography, and Jonny Greenwood’s mesmerizing score, and the way the movie pits capitalism and religion against each other while showing the way they mirror one another. More, more, more, more, more.
And so I’m wondering: Is that the theme here? The multitude of conversational starting points There Will Be Blood offers its audiences—the way the movie can be whatever you need it to be, however you need it to be it.
Or am I really just trying to say the simplest thing of all: There Will Be Blood is really, really fucking good.
THE VIEWING
A timestamped rewatch of There Will Be Blood
