10 / 10
Official trailer
There Will Be Blood is the Paul Thomas Anderson-directed period drama loosely adapted from Upton Sinclair’s 1927 novel Oil!
Anderson directed and wrote the screenplay. Daniel Day-Lewis plays Daniel Plainview, a Texas-born oil prospector who builds an oil empire in early-twentieth-century California. Paul Dano plays both Paul Sunday and his twin brother Eli Sunday, the young evangelical preacher who claims to have founded the Church of the Third Revelation. Dillon Freasier plays H.W. Plainview, Daniel’s adopted son.
Kevin J. O’Connor plays Henry Brands, the man who arrives claiming to be Daniel’s half-brother. Ciarán Hinds plays Fletcher Hamilton, Daniel’s longtime associate. The plot follows Plainview’s career from a solitary silver mine in 1898 through his accumulation of oil-bearing land in the early twentieth century, his relationship with H.W., his confrontations with the Sunday twins, and his eventual isolation in a Long Beach mansion.
The film made approximately seventy-six million dollars worldwide on a twenty-five million dollar budget. The commercial performance was strong for a serious-drama release. The film received eight Academy Award nominations and won two (Best Actor for Day-Lewis and Best Cinematography for Robert Elswit). There Will Be Blood is consistently cited among the major American films of the 2000s. The 2016 BBC Culture poll of international critics named it the greatest film of the twenty-first century to that point.
I’d rank this above anything made this century without much argument.
Day-Lewis is frightening, Greenwood’s score disturbs me from the first drone, and Anderson never once asks me to like Plainview. I don’t, and I can’t look away from him. My one small gripe is outside the film: the milkshake line became a joke on its own, and people who’ve only heard the joke have no idea how ugly that scene is.
The Day-Lewis Performance
Daniel Day-Lewis plays Daniel Plainview across approximately thirty years of fictional time.
The character begins as a solitary silver prospector in 1898 and ends as an isolated wealthy industrialist in 1927. The performance commits to Plainview’s specific evolution: the careful early competence, the rising public-presentation skills as the oil business expands, the deepening misanthropy as relationships fail, and the eventual collapse into the bowling-alley confrontation that closes the film. Day-Lewis sustains the transformation through specific physical, vocal, and psychological evolution across the runtime.
The performance’s vocal commitment has been the most-imitated element. Day-Lewis based the voice partly on John Huston (the director’s distinctive drawl from his appearance in Chinatown and other films). The vocal choice carries the character’s particular kind of charisma-as-weapon. Plainview’s voice is the tool through which he extracts what he wants from other people.
The audience reads each conversation through the gap between what Plainview is saying and what Plainview is doing. Day-Lewis plays the gap consistently throughout. The Oscar was deserved.
The performance has been consistently cited among the major dramatic performances of the twenty-first century.
The voice is the thing I’d single out from the whole film. Every friendly word Plainview says sounds like a man counting your money while you’re still holding it, and I find him more frightening when he’s being charming than when he’s shouting.
For Writers
A character’s voice can contain their entire moral architecture. Daniel Plainview’s drawl is the instrument through which he extracts value from other people. The lesson applies to fiction. Voice in writing isn’t just style. Voice is character. The reader reads a character through how they speak. Build the vocal patterns that match the psychological structure. The voice will define the character even when the events of the plot are doing other work.
The Greenwood Score
Jonny Greenwood (of Radiohead) composed the film’s score in his second major orchestral work after Bodysong (2003).
The score uses dissonant string textures, electronic drones, and rhythmic ostinatos that the audience reads as both period-suitable and contemporary. The opening fifteen minutes of the film play with minimal dialogue and the score carrying the emotional content. The score also produces specific moments of menace throughout the film when the audience needs to recognize that something dangerous is approaching despite the visual content being relatively neutral.
The Academy famously disqualified the score from Academy Award consideration on technical grounds (the rules required that more than fifty percent of the score be composed for the film, and Greenwood’s score included material from his earlier work).
The disqualification produced significant industry response. The score itself has been consistently cited as one of the major film scores of the past two decades. Greenwood has continued working with Paul Thomas Anderson across later films (The Master 2012, Inherent Vice 2014, Phantom Thread 2017, Licorice Pizza 2021).
I think Greenwood’s score is half the reason I love the film. Those strings sound like the ground itself groaning, and in the near-silent opening they’re doing all the talking. An unconventional composer choice can make a score a primary craft element instead of background support, and this is the proof.
For Writers
Unconventional collaboration choices can produce work that works outside the existing genre vocabulary. Anderson’s collaboration with Greenwood produced a score that works differently from standard period-drama scoring. The lesson is that creative work benefits from collaborators chosen for what they’ll bring instead of for their existing genre credentials. Pick people whose specific approach is what the work needs. The unfamiliar combinations produce work the familiar combinations can’t.
The Religious Material
The film’s central thematic content is the relationship between oil capitalism and American evangelical religion. Plainview’s business expansion in California requires the support of Eli Sunday’s Third Revelation Church. Eli requires Plainview’s wealth to expand his ministry. Each man hates the other. Each man needs the other. The film stages multiple confrontations between them that are commentary on the wider American history the two figures represent.
The most-discussed individual sequence is the church baptism in which Eli forces Plainview to publicly accept religious conversion before completing the oil contract Plainview needs.
Eli physically slaps and humiliates Plainview during the ritual. Plainview submits because the business requires it. The sequence runs approximately five minutes and is an unusually extended depiction of religious-economic transaction in American cinema. The film argues that American oil capitalism and American evangelical religion are mutually dependent forces whose specific contempt for each other is structural instead of personal.
The baptism is the scene I’d show anyone who asks why this gets a 10. Watching Plainview take Eli’s slaps and swallow his pride because the contract needs it is funny and sickening at once, and I can’t think of another film where greed and piety feed on each other this openly.
For Writers
Period drama can make historical arguments about how contemporary culture was formed. There Will Be Blood argues that twenty-first-century American oil capitalism and American evangelical religion emerged together from a relationship of mutual contempt and mutual dependence. The lesson is that strong historical fiction can identify the moments and dynamics that produced later cultural conditions. Pick the moments where the future was being formed. Show the mechanisms. The audience will read the contemporary implications through the historical specificity.
Craft Note
The closing bowling-alley sequence is the film’s most economical structural payoff and the source of its most-quoted line. Plainview, now isolated in his Long Beach mansion, receives a visit from the destitute Eli Sunday who needs money. Plainview forces Eli to renounce his religious faith publicly. He then beats Eli to death with a bowling pin. The sequence closes with Plainview’s announcement to his butler that he’s finished. The “I drink your milkshake” speech in the middle of the sequence has entered general cultural reference.
Daniel Day-Lewis plays the entire sequence with sustained physical commitment that lets the audience read Plainview’s specific psychological state directly. The film argues that the accumulated misanthropy across thirty years has produced a man whose only remaining pleasure is the destruction of the people who tried to use him. The bowling-alley sequence is the film’s actual final argument. The argument is bleak. The bleakness is the point.
Is There Will Be Blood as good as people say?
10/10, and I don’t have to think about it.
Paul Thomas Anderson at the top of his game, Daniel Day-Lewis giving the performance I compare every other screen performance of this century to, Jonny Greenwood’s score and Robert Elswit’s Oscar-winning cinematography all pull in the same direction. The bowling-alley ending is ugly, funny and horrifying at once, and it settles the 10 for me because Anderson follows Plainview all the way down and never flinches. Watch it, then read Upton Sinclair’s Oil! for the novel it loosely adapts.
