Daniel Day-Lewis as an oil prospector at the turn of the twentieth century. Paul Thomas Anderson's most ferocious film.
Daniel Plainview is a silver prospector who finds oil instead. He builds a small oil-drilling operation in the desert with his adopted son H.W. In 1911 he is led by a young man named Paul Sunday to a town called Little Boston, California, where Paul says oil seeps out of the ground. Plainview acquires the land, builds a derrick, and the town's economy reorganises around him.
The film tracks Plainview's accumulation across two decades. He builds a pipeline. He drives his competitors out. He fights Eli Sunday — Paul's twin brother, a young Pentecostal preacher who wants the town's soul on his own terms. By the film's last act, set in 1927, Plainview is wealthy and alone, drinking himself into a private mansion. The bowling-alley confrontation that closes the film is the resolution it has been building toward.
The first fifteen minutes of There Will Be Blood contain no dialogue. Daniel Plainview, alone in a mine shaft, swings a pickaxe at silver-bearing rock. A timber breaks. He falls and breaks his leg. He climbs out of the shaft with his leg dragging behind him, drags himself across the desert, and arrives at the assayer's office to register his claim.
Jonny Greenwood's score — atonal strings, percussion that sounds like rocks knocking against each other — runs underneath this sequence with no melody. It is one of the most uncompromising openings ever attempted in a film released by a major studio (Miramax/Paramount Vantage).
Day-Lewis won his second Best Actor Oscar for the performance (his first was My Left Foot in 1990; his third would be Lincoln in 2013). The character was reportedly based on Day-Lewis's research into John Huston's voice; Plainview's elongated Mid-Atlantic vowels and slightly old-fashioned cadence are a deliberate construction.
What's striking about the performance, on rewatching, is how funny it is. Plainview is a misanthrope who finds his own contempt entertaining. The 'I drink your milkshake' speech is, on the page, a piece of property-law explanation. On screen, it's the most-quoted American film monologue of the 2000s, because Day-Lewis plays it as a man giddy at his own cruelty.
Greenwood, of Radiohead, had scored Anderson's films before; There Will Be Blood is the collaboration that established the partnership as a major force in American film scoring. The score uses extended string techniques — col legno, sul ponticello, dissonant clusters — to create a continuous undercurrent of unease that the film's compositions don't otherwise carry.
The bowling-alley sequence — Plainview, drunk, in his private bowling alley, confronted by Eli Sunday asking for money — is the film's climax and its argument. Plainview's revenge is verbal, then physical. The film closes with one line and a dolly shot: 'I'm finished.'