An epic with a coal-black heart, Paul Thomas Anderson's loose adaptation of Upton Sinclair's Oil! thumbs its grimy nose at the ennobling pretensions of most Oscar-season pictures. But while this bracing cynicism will likely get a lot of ink, the real power of Anderson's film — certainly some sort of masterpiece — lies not in its iconoclasm but in good old movie-making grandeur. More than anything, There Will Be Blood is a breathtakingly well-made film. Dramatic, suspenseful, and with real sweep, for most of its running time it's the kind of film you'll want to take your grandparents to; just hustle them out of the theater before it comes to its stark conclusion.
Even fans of Anderson's previous work may be surprised by the material this time out. Whereas his earlier films tended towards multi-character narratives with subplots run amok, There Will Be Blood remains uncannily fixated for its two-and-a-half-hour running time on one character: Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis), whom we first meet in 1898 as a breathless figure bent over in a hole in the ground, digging for oil. These early scenes owe a great deal to Kubrick's 2001; without dialogue, Anderson focuses on the physicality of Plainview's work, set to the strains of Jonny Greenwood's atonal score, which consciously evokes the work of Gyorgy Ligeti, whose music was used in 2001 and The Shining.
But while the primates of Kubrick's film would rise and become men, the single-minded Plainview remains the same ape he is in these opening scenes. The film follows him as he makes his fortune and comes to the settlement of Little Boston, a land rich in oil and little else. After Plainview makes a deal with a poor family of goat farmers, he finds himself both allied and in simmering conflict with one of the family's sons, Eli Sunday (Paul Dano), a teen preacher whose earnest demeanor hides a ruthless ambition of his own. The push-pull between Sunday's growing flock (which benefits mightily from the oil money) and Plainview's oil business is the center of the film. Not to mention its main allegorical motif. If you're wondering why Anderson chose to adapt one segment of a fairly obscure work from an author now largely considered obsolete, notice the focus on cynical capitalism's alliance with an evangelizing church.
Anderson has been knocked by some in the past for referencing Robert Altman and Martin Scorsese (who some critics seem to believe invented the tracking shot). In many ways, with its echoes of 2001 and Giant, There Will Be Blood is Anderson's most derivative work to date, but that's not a bad thing. Much like Tarantino, Anderson digests the stylistic flourishes of his predecessors and deploys them in new, compelling ways. Day-Lewis does the same, in a performance that initially feels like a John Huston impersonation and then transforms into something monstrous and riveting. This magnificent film takes something familiar and turns it into something wondrously new.
— Bilge Ebiri
