There Will Be Blood

Our Verdict on There Will Be Blood

There Will Be Blood is Paul Thomas Anderson's masterpiece and Daniel Day-Lewis's greatest performance, which is saying something in a career that includes My Left Foot and Lincoln. Loosely adapted from Upton Sinclair's 1927 novel Oil!, the film abandons Sinclair's socialist politics almost entirely and replaces them with something far more unsettling: a moral tragedy about what ambition does to the human soul when it is untethered from love, faith, or any purpose beyond accumulation. It is the rare film that cannot be claimed by either the left or the right because it is not about politics. It is about a man who wins the entire world and destroys his own soul, and it ends with one of the most brutal two-word exits in cinema history.

The story follows Daniel Plainview (Day-Lewis), a silver miner who discovers oil and builds an empire through a combination of geological intuition, physical daring, and a complete willingness to exploit everyone around him. The opening fifteen minutes are nearly wordless: Plainview alone in a pit, breaking rock, surviving a fall, dragging himself across the desert. From the start, Anderson tells us that this man is self-made and utterly alone, and these two facts are the same fact. When Plainview adopts the orphaned son of a dead worker and brands him 'H.W.' (Dillon Freasier), it is both a genuine act of compassion and a business strategy: 'I'm a family man,' he explains, and you believe him and you absolutely do not.

The film's central conflict pits Plainview against Eli Sunday (Paul Dano), a young preacher in the town of Little Boston where Plainview makes his greatest strike. Eli runs a storefront church called the Church of the Third Revelation, and he sees Plainview's oil as leverage for his own ambitions. The two men are mirror images: one worships money, the other worships his own holiness, and both are frauds. Anderson's genius is that he refuses to take sides. Eli's faith is a performance designed to extract money and status from his congregation, but Plainview's contempt for religion is not wisdom. It is the contempt of a man who worships a different god and refuses to admit it.

Day-Lewis's performance is a force of nature. He found Plainview's voice by listening to recordings of John Huston (director of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre), and the result is a character who sounds like a 19th-century carnival barker stumbling into the 20th century. His speeches are hypnotic: the land-buying pitch where he promises to build schools and roads while privately planning to drain the town dry, the baptism scene where Eli slaps him repeatedly and Plainview confesses to abandoning his son ('I've abandoned my child!'), and the final confrontation in Plainview's private bowling alley, where the decades of accumulated hatred between the two men culminate in violence. 'I drink your milkshake!' is the line everyone quotes, but the line that matters more is Plainview's final word: 'I'm finished.' He does not mean the conversation. He means his life.

The VVWS lands at TRADITIONAL +15.0, and the reasoning requires care because There Will Be Blood is a film about greed destroying a man's soul, and greedy men have been villains in every moral tradition since scripture. The key distinction is that Anderson does not frame Plainview's corruption as a failure of capitalism. Capitalism is the setting, not the cause. Plainview is corrupted by his own choices: his refusal to love, his instrumentalization of his son, his hatred of Eli, his descent into alcoholic isolation. He is given every opportunity to choose differently, and he rejects them all. This is not a systemic critique. This is a moral one, and the moral framework is older than capitalism. 'What does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul?' is Mark 8:36, not Marx, and Anderson's film is a two-and-a-half-hour illustration of that verse.

The film's treatment of religion is also worth examining. Eli Sunday is a fraud, a charismatic showman who uses the language of faith to accumulate power. A lesser filmmaker would make this an indictment of Christianity itself. Anderson does not. The film's holiest moment is the baptism scene: Plainview submits to it as a transaction (he needs the church's land pipeline), but the ritual still works on him. He confesses. Eli strikes him and he confesses more. The sacrament of confession is real, even when both parties are corrupt. That is not the work of a filmmaker who hates religion. It is the work of one who takes it seriously.

There Will Be Blood is the American Dream inverted: a self-made man who makes himself into nothing worth being. It is not a political film. It is a spiritual one, and it arrives at a conclusion that would have been legible to Dante: there is a special circle of hell for men who had everything and chose more anyway. Plainview ends the film alone in a mansion, drunk, having murdered the only man who ever understood him, having destroyed every relationship he ever had. He is finished. And Anderson makes you feel the weight of that word.

Woke Tropes & Content Analysis

Formula: Weighted Score = Severity × Authenticity Multiplier × Centrality Multiplier

Score Margin: +15.0 TRAD

Content Breakdown