There Will Be Blood
by Paul Thomas Anderson
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Barry Del Sherman, Ciarán Hinds, Daniel Day-Lewis, Dillon Freasier, Paul DanoDirector: Paul Thomas Anderson
Brand: Paramount
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown), Dolby Digital 5.1; English (Subtitled); French (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled); English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 5.1; French (Dubbed), Dolby Digital 5.1; Spanish (Dubbed), Dolby Digital 5.1
Format: Closed-captioned, Color, NTSC, Widescreen
Picture Format: 2.35:1
Running Time: 158 minutes
Published: 2008-04-01
DVD Release Date: 2008-04-08
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Studio: Paramount
Movie Reviews of There Will Be Blood
Movie Review: I drink your milkshake!
Summary: 5 Stars
Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) is an oilman, pure and simple. He searches for it, buys, cheats, or steals the land where he finds it, and then he drills for it. He has little patience for human realations, but sees everything as a magnificent struggle, with the land, with the oil, with the workers he must hire to drill for it. You wouldn't like this man, but you'd respect, or at the very least, fear him. He is like a force of nature, and only pretends to have normal human feelings in order to negotiate a better deal when he is buying, cheating, or stealing land on which to drill for oil. Daniel Day-Lewis has really thrown himself into the role, and he aims to play the role to the hilt, without caring at all about the audience liking his character. In fact, the less you like him, the better he is doing his job. But it can be lonely, and when he thinks he has found a long lost brother, Henry Brand (Kevin J. O'Connor), he confesses his feelings:
Daniel Plainview: I see the worst in people. I don't need to look past seeing them to get all I need. I've built my hatreds up over the years, little by little, Henry... to have you here gives me a second breath. I can't keep doing this on my own with these... people.
[laughs]
He adopts a son, if only to have a friendly face to distract the people when he comes to buy, cheat, or steal their land. When the boy becomes ill, he sends him away. A preacher from the Church of the Third Revelation, Eli Sunday (Paul Dano .... Dwayne in Little Miss Sunshine) is trying to manipulate him into giving money to his church. Eli sunday tries to make him feel guilty in order to exploit him.
Eli Sunday: So say it now- I am a sinner.
Plainview: I am a sinner.
Eli Sunday: Say it louder- I am a sinner!
Plainview: I am a sinner.
Eli Sunday: Louder, Daniel. I am a sinner!
Plainview: I am a sinner.
Eli Sunday: I am sorry Lord!
Plainview: I am sorry Lord.
Eli Sunday: I want the blood!
Plainview: I want the blood.
Eli Sunday: You have abandoned your child!
Plainview: I have abandoned my child.
Eli Sunday: I will never backslide!
Plainview: I will never backslide.
Eli Sunday: I was lost, but now I am found!
Plainview: I was lost but now I'm found.
Eli Sunday: I have abandoned my child!
[Plainview glares at him]
Eli Sunday: Say it... say it!
[Plainview mumbles]
Eli Sunday: Say it louder... say it louder!
Plainview: I've abandoned my child! I've abandoned my child! I've abandoned my boy!
The Sunday farm is only fit for growing weeds, and raising goats. The soil is alkaline, and the water is salty but there is oil. The only problem for Eli is that his brother Paul Sunday (also played by Paul Dano in a dual role) has already sold the land to Plainview.
Eli Sunday: Daniel, I'm asking if you'd like to have business with the Church of the Third Revelation in developing this lease on young Bandy's thousand acre tract. I'm offering you to drill on one of the great undeveloped fields of Little Boston!
Plainview: I'd be happy to work with you.
Eli Sunday: You would? Yes, yes, of course. Wonderful.
Plainview: But there is one condition for this work.
Eli Sunday: All right.
Plainview: I'd like you to tell me that you are a false prophet... I'd like you to tell me that you are, and have been, a false prophet... and that God is a superstition.
Eli Sunday: ...but that's a lie... it's a lie, I cannot say it.
[long pause]
Eli Sunday: When can we begin to drill?
Plainview: Right away.
Eli Sunday: How long will it take to bring in the well?
Plainview: Should be very quick.
Eli Sunday: I would like a one hundred thousand dollar signing bonus plus the five that is owed with interest.
Plainview: That's only fair.
Eli Sunday: I am a false prophet and God is a superstition. If that's what you believe, then I will say it.
Plainview: Say it like you mean it.
Eli Sunday: Daniel...
Plainview: Say it like it's your sermon.
Eli Sunday: This is foolish.
[long pause]
Eli Sunday: I am a false prophet! God is a superstition! I am a false prophet! God is a superstition! I am a false prophet! God is a superstition!
[pause]
Eli Sunday: Is that fine?
Plainview: Those areas have been drilled.
Eli Sunday: What?
Plainview: Those areas have been drilled.
Eli Sunday: ...no they haven't...
Plainview: It's called drainage. I own everything around it... so I get everything underneath it.
Eli Sunday: But there are no derricks there. This is the Bandy tract. Do you understand?
Plainview: Do you? I drink your water, Eli. I drink it up. Everyday. I drink the blood of lamb from Bandy's tract.
[How can this be? Plainview is really taking delight in turning the tables on the 'false prophet.']
Plainview: Drainage! Drainage, Eli, you boy. Drained dry. I'm so sorry. Here, if you have a milkshake, and I have a milkshake, and I have a straw. There it is, that's a straw, you see? You watching?. And my straw reaches acroooooooss the room, and starts to drink your milkshake... I... drink... your... milkshake!
[sucking sound]
Plainview: I drink it up!
There Will Be Blood is a tour de force performance from Daniel Day-Lewis. You might not like the character he is playing, but you have to admit that he is totally commited to that character, and matches Plainview's intensity, pound for pound, every second he is onscreen.
The cinematography and settings are magnificent. The composer of the film's music was Jonny Greenwood, primarily famous as the guitarist for the British rock band Radiohead. There is some Brahms and music from other composers, but the bulk of the music was by Greenwood, and it really adds to the epic granduer. This is an epic of man against nature. There are long stretches where there is no dialogue at all, just man battling against nature, struggling and striving to pump that oil out of the ground. Living in Bakersfield, an oil town, I see oil derricks all around me. Some of the action takes place right here, for instance, scenes were shot in Santa Clarita, and they talk of a pipeline through the Tehachapi Mountains. That is right down Kern Canyon. We have a Kern County Oil Museum, and other historic sights in Taft. All that history is right around us, and it made me curious about how they got all the oil pumping. There Will Be Blood tells that story very well.
TEN PIVOTAL ROLES OF DANIEL DAY-LEWIS
Gangs of New York (Two-Disc Collector's Edition) (2002) .... Bill 'The Butcher' Cutting
The Boxer (Collector's Edition) (1997) .... Danny Flynn
The Crucible (1996) .... John Proctor
In the Name of the Father (1993) .... Gerry Conlon
The Age of Innocence (1993) .... Newland Archer
The Last of the Mohicans (Director's Expanded Edition) (1992) .... Hawkeye (Nathaniel Poe)
My Left Foot (My Left Foot: The Story of Christy Brown) [ NON-USA FORMAT, PAL, Reg.2 Import - Germany ] (1989) .... Christy Brown
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Two-Disc Special Edition) (1988) .... Tomas
A Room with a View (Two-Disc Special Edition) (1985) (as Daniel Day Lewis) .... Cecil Vyse
My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) (as Daniel Day Lewis) .... Johnny
I drink your milkshake!
Summary of There Will Be Blood
A sprawling epic of family, faith, power and oil, There Will Be Blood is set on the incendiary frontier of California?s turn-of-the-century petroleum boom. The story chronicles the life and times of one Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis), who transforms himself from a down-and-out silver miner raising a son on his own into a self-made oil tycoon. When Plainview gets a mysterious tip-off that there?s a little town out West where an ocean of oil is oozing out of the ground, he heads with his son, H.W. (Dillon Freasier), to take their chances in dust-worn Little Boston. In this hardscrabble town, where the main excitement centers around the holy roller church of charismatic preacher Eli Sunday (Paul Dano), Plainview and H.W. make their lucky strike. But even as the well raises all of their fortunes, nothing will remain the same as conflicts escalate and every human value ? love, hope, community, belief, ambition and even the bond between father and son ? is imperiled by corruption, deception and the flow of oil.Unmistakably a shot at greatness, Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood succeeds in wild, explosive ways. The film digs into nothing less than the sources of peculiarly American kinds of ambition, corruption, and industry--and makes exhilarating cinema from it all. Although inspired by Upton Sinclair's 1927 novel Oil!, Anderson has crafted his own take on the material, focusing on a black-eyed, self-made oilman named Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis), whose voracious appetite for oil turns him into a California tycoon in the early years of the 20th century. The early reels are a mesmerizing look at the getting of oil from the ground, an intensely physical process that later broadens into Plainview's equally indomitable urge to control land and power. Curious, diverting episodes accumulate during Plainview's rise: a mighty derrick fire (a bravura opportunity that Anderson, with the aid of cinematographer Robert Elswit, does not fail to meet), a visit from a long-lost brother (Kevin J. O'Connor), the ongoing involvement of Plainview's poker-faced adoptive son (Dillon Freasier). As the film progresses, it gravitates toward Plainview's rivalry with the local representative of God, a preacher named Eli Sunday (brimstone-spitting Paul Dano); religion and capitalism are thus presented not so much as opposing forces but as two sides of the same coin. And the worm in the apple here is less man's greed than his vanity. Anderson's offbeat take on all this--exemplified by the astonishing musical score by Jonny Greenwood--occasionally threatens to break the film apart, but even when it founders, it excites. As for Daniel Day-Lewis, his performance is Olivier-like in its grand scope and its attention to details of behavior; Plainview speaks in the rum-rich voice of John Huston, and squints with the wariness of Walter Huston. It's a fearsome performance, and the engine behind the film's relentless power. --Robert Horton
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