Film Review: “There Will Be Blood”
In accomplishing There Will Be Blood, Paul Thomas Anderson put his finger on 100+ of American history and psychology, its greed, its contradictions, its legacy of violence, pulled out from their roots. Capitalism and evangelism aren’t only themes, but intertwined, the head and tail of a snake devouring itself. Blood exposed them not systems of economic ascendancy and superior intelligence, but as performances designed to convince their faithful believers they were.
I watched There Will Be Blood this month, afraid that I would lose the stupefied feeling I felt the first time as the Brahms’ concerto played, and I did, but I don’t think that’s a bad thing. I was fearful to re-watch it because There Will Be Blood is one of the few films that has worked on my conscious in a particular way: it felt so meaningful and so relevant, incredible that one film express those ideas those forcefully without being pedantic, and I didn’t want to lose that sensation. Like the scarcity principle, the film would maintain its value when viewed in restricted amounts; watched too frequently and its value would be depreciated (the irony of evaluating Daniel Plainview’s story in economic terms). I did find that sensation diminished, but I found it was replaced with admiration and a more grounded sense of respect for the film. The childlike awe at a spectacle was replaced with understanding for how the long takes and the shot-reverse shots are intentionally used—the shot-reverse shots are used sparingly. There are more long takes and wide shots than close-ups, so we understand how the characters interact with one another; so our interpretation isn’t “manipulated” by quick cutting, reverse shots, or a dramatic close-up. Johnny Greenwood’s score is cacophonous and loud, but never would I trade it for a traditional orchestral arrangement. Clarity supplanted astonishment.
When it was released in 2007, There Will Be Blood was a damning indictment of American capitalism and evangelism as two evils feeding off one another, but eventually capitalism would subsume all. Both are foundational. Both are performative. Both demand their acolytes say whatever necessary to get what they want, just as much in 1911 as today. But 2025’s political players might just one-up Daniel Plainview’s resolve and cruelty.
Capitalism and evangelism are both highly performative. Daniel adopts H.W. not out of care or integrity (the baby’s father died working on the job for Daniel), but from strategy. He sees an infant sitting in a basket and he recognizes that a child will make him look sympathetic to the townspeople from whose land he wants to extract oil. Eli Sunday delivers sermons in tongues and claims to heal arthritis with the Holy Spirit. His body lurches, hands flail, his voice rises in cadence to an almost demonic inflection point. All of it is calculated but hollow. And yet, it works, because in America, we mistake performance for authenticity when it tells us what we want to hear.
I don’t believe Daniel ever loved H.W. He was a tool, an accessory to make land deals go more smoothly. And when the tool became burdensome and diverting, Daniel cast him aside. When H.W. returns, their reunion is framed in a wide shot, with dead space on either side of them. It’s distancing, it’s empty because that is their relationship—distanced and transactional. When the adult H.W. ends their transactional relationship, Daniel’s reaction reads as ego. He’s not mourning a son, he’s furious that something his has left him. Daniel doesn’t care about people, he cares about ownership.
Both men lie and scheme, but only one of them is willing to acknowledge face the lies. Eli behaves as if he’s above it all, above Daniel’s corruption and two-facedness. Like evangelicals today, he’s above the fray, the hedonism of everyone around him. Eli has all but convinced himself of his sermons and his own powers of healing. Daniel is skeptical of Eli in equal measure, but unlike Eli, doesn’t delude himself about his rival. He knows Eli is just as low and corruptible as him, when the circumstances are ripe. Daniel will promise jobs, schools, economic prosperity, whatever it takes to accumulate land. If submitting to a baptism gets him the Bandy tract, he’ll humiliate himself for it. They’re just words, money is louder. Integrity is for the poor. When Eli eventually comes crawling to Daniel, broke and desperate, it’s Daniel’s turn to baptize him, in the gospel of capitalism: revenge and submission.
Revenge and submission have taken on a different characterization in the current era. The second Trump administration has given Daniel’s confessional (of sorts) “I want no one else to succeed” new meaning. Trump’s appeal isn’t rooted in what he offers his voters, but in what he promises to take from others. Trump threatens to prosecute political rivals to solidify power. He is extorting universities for challenging the far-right’s intellectual conformity. His administration seeks to ban immigrants from escaping war, poverty, and famine because they practice the wrong religion. His administration is deporting thousands of immigrants under the false presumption they’re taking jobs from white Americans. The Big Beautiful Bill stands to strip health insurance approximately 17 million people under another false presumption that millions are cheating the system—the solution is for everyone on Medicaid to lose their access. Daniel Plainview wanted to win; MAGA wants everyone else to suffer.
The same emotional austerity informs the film’s technical elements and use of the cinematic language. It doesn’t feel claustrophobic, but we’re not given sweeping landscape footage either. The combination of a single shot with a single chord. Instead of a series of location shots dotting the opening and ends of scenes to enable us to grasp the environment, the opening wide of New Mexico, paired with Greenwood’s harsh, dissonant chord, sufficiently imprints the stark cruelty of the land, so that we can fill out the left and right sides of the frame in our mind. Anderson and his team use the tools of cinema to convey a sense of place through emotion and imagination rather than spelling out every acre of land.
Much has already been written about Daniel Day-Lewis’s performance, and I won’t try to top any of it. I’ll just say that, like Cate Blanchett’s Lydia Tár, Daniel Plainview feels like a real person, cursed be the man who whoever crossed paths with him. Likewise, Paul Dano’s Eli is equal parts pathetic and effective. He’s not cartoonish but he’s desperate. His downfall from the pulpit of the Church of the Third Resurrection to the gutters of Daniel’s bowling alley isn’t shocking because it’s unexpected, it’s shocking because it was inevitable. Money is everything and the church is no exception, it’s why so many evangelical pastors, most recently the Caldwells, have faced charges for fraud and corruption. The prayer and the sermons are the performance, but when they close their Bible, they’re no more than Eli in Daniel’s bowling alley, scrounging for money and trading favors to enrich themselves. The performance isn’t the glory, it’s the grift necessary to be allowed to get away with it and obtain financial glory.
That’s the defining aspect of American culture, according to There Will Be Blood. We are a transactional society. Money is the alpha and omega. It’s how the captains of industry conducted business in the early 20th century. It’s how politicians behave now. Elected officials tell working- and middle-class Americans what they want to hear during the campaign and then move on when the settle into their elected office. Campaign promises are just words. Candidates get votes just like Daniel got the Bandy tract. Their voters can’t offer them anything else after election day, but their donors can. Nothing is sacred unless it can be bought, and now, burned down everything around it. Paul Thomas Anderson didn’t just make a film about one man’s greed, he made a requiem for a country that has conflated ruthlessness with greatness.