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There Will Be Blood Our rating: Rate this movie   MPAA rating: R (for some action/peril, mild language and brief smoking) Genre: Drama Theater release: December 26, 2007 by Paramount Vantage Directed by: Paul Thomas Anderson Runtime: 2 hours 38 minutes Cast: Daniel Day-Lewis (Daniel Plainview), Paul Dano (Eli and Paul Sunday), Dillon Freasier (H.W.), Ciaran Hinds (Fletcher Hamilton), Russell Harvard (H.W.—older), Kevin J. O'Connor (Henry), David Willis (Abel Sunday) Related: Talk About It/Family Corner

In Roman Polanski's Chinatown, detective Jake Gittes became suspicious of a devious California millionaire named Noah Cross, played by the great John Huston. Dazzled by Cross's fortune, acquired by laying irrigation pipelines across LA, Gittes asked why such a rich man would want to get richer. "What can you buy that you can't already afford?"

Cross's answer was simple: "The future."

That answer would probably make sense to Daniel Plainview, the central character of There Will Be Blood, written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. Plainview makes his fortune tapping into "an ocean of oil" under his feet, driven by insatiable ambition.

As Plainview tries to buy up land and put in a pipeline of his own, he consults a real estate expert about the area surrounding Little Boston, California. He points to a specific spot on the map, and the expert nods: "That can be got, I'm sure." Plainview, his ravenous appetite growing with everything he consumes, asks, "Can everything around here be got?"

Curiously, it's not just greed and pipelines that Plainview and Chinatown's Cross have in common. It's the voice. Played with monstrous energy and complexity by Daniel Day-Lewis, Plainview seems possessed by the same evil spirit, rasping each line as if his throat is a chimney. He's the kind of guy who probably drinks coffee straight from the pot—and then swallows the grounds.

Daniel Day-Lewis as Daniel Plainview

When we first meet Plainview, he's mining for silver. Hunting for something beautiful, he emerges with something darker, something flammable, something that stains. He calls it "gold." And barrel by barrel, he builds a hellish heaven of his own. With every achievement, his ambition grows, until it squelches the sparks of his dying conscience.

Most of the time, Plainview glad-hands like a campaigning politician. Calling himself himself a "family man," he assures his target communities that he prefers "plain speaking," that he happens to "enjoy all faiths," and that "the children are our future." He even passes off H.W. (Dillon Freasier)—the orphan of a driller killed in the line of duty—as his own cute-as-a-button boy, so that he can seduce the Little Boston locals.

But in a rare moment of honesty, Plainview admits, "There is a competition in me. I want no one else to succeed." Like the oil saturating the ground, his hatred rests on the surface, twisting his smile and his speech. But it takes 158 minutes to plumb the depths of the reservoir beneath his hard façade. Suppressed rage blasts to the surface if Plainview perceives anyone's judgment, or if his failures and weaknesses are exposed.

Throughout the film, oil is a metaphor for blood. In a moment of unsettling and almost ceremonial reverence, a man smears oil on a baby's forehead. And when young Eli Sunday, the preacher at Little Boston's Church of the Third Revelation, pays Plainview a surprise visit to reveal the secret of his family's ranch in Little Boston, Plainview hurries off like an oil-thirsty vampire, all but baring his fangs.

Paul Dano is terrific as the manipulative preacher Eli Sunday

This film's title might be a reference to oil, but it could also be a line from one of Sunday's euphoric (and perhaps even demonic) sermons. Played with riveting confidence by Little Miss Sunshine's Paul Dano, Sunday rigorously compels confessions and conversions like a rig pumping oil. He's a charismatic minister, twisting the terminology of traditional Christianity into incantations and manipulation. Claiming to cast out an evil spirit, he advances toward the camera, shrieking and spitting his words, scarier than any evil spirit. He's a holy-roller version of the chauvinistic motivational speaker played by Tom Cruise in Anderson's Magnolia.

Some might find Dano's performance a joke, wondering what congregations would sit still for such histrionics. But it's not hard to find other examples of misguided, seduced congregations—on YouTube, cable TV, or in classic American literature. Anderson's movie is not a condemnation of Christian faith. In fact, on a deeper level it's consistent with Christ's teaching about the nature of ego and greed. Sunday's little sister—tellingly named "Mary"—is a faint figure of grace at the edge of the frame.

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