I had found out first about this movie from watching the Academy Awards in 2007. Daniel Day-Lewis was nominated for the movie and the clip I saw him acting in was so powerful. And it’s funny because Paul Dano has such a cherubic face yet he plays this deep haunting role. I saw him in a couple of other movies. He played a writer in Ruby Sparks and a sadistic slave overseer named John Tibeats in 12 Years a Slave. In There Will Be Blood, Paul Dano plays Paul Sunday and Eli Sunday, who are brothers. Eli is a preacher at the local church and his role as the preacher was so powerful. I also love how the film uses nuances of silences and dialogues. And it also talks about the power of communication because H.W., Daniel’s son, is blown away when the oil rig explodes and loses his hearing in the blast. Daniel is pained that his son can no longer hear, and Daniel finds him a sign language teacher. H.W. ends up marrying Mary Sunday and she learns sign language and communicates with him in sign language when they get married. When H.W. meets with his dad, he brings his sign language interpreter. He tells Daniel he and Mary are moving to Mexico so that H.W. can start his own oil company. Instead of supporting him, Daniel sees this as a betrayal on H.W.’s part and calls him all sorts of names and derides his hearing loss. He disowns his son because he now feels that he has no one else to support him. H.W. supported his dad in his oil business pursuits when he was younger but when he lost his hearing it traumatized both him and his dad. Another powerful scene is when Daniel meets his long-lost brother, Henry, but then finds out that the guy who posed as Henry isn’t actually Henry, but Henry’s friend. Henry actually died of tuberculosis. When he hears this news that this guy isn’t actually his brother, Daniel is disillusioned and shoots this guy dead.
Eli Sunday’s character is also quite interesting. At the beginning of the film he seems innocent and sweet when Daniel first meets him, but then we actually see him in action as a preacher and that is a whole nother story. His first person whom he saves is an elderly woman who supposedly has the devil inside of her. Eli clutches the woman’s face and at first he whispers to get the ghosts out of her, and then he is breaking down and screaming bloody murder at the ghosts. It is a haunting scene but one that shows how Paul Dano really gave this role his all. In another scene, Eli runs into Daniel in the oil field and Daniel is angry at him so he runs Eli into the ground and smears his body and face with oil and slaps him repeatedly down. Later on, when Mr. William Bandy, the guy whose property Daniel wants to construct an oil pipeline through, and Daniel attend Eli’s church service, Daniel volunteers to go up there and Eli ends up doing the same thing Daniel did to him: slapping him across the face and screaming at him. He screams at Daniel to say that he is a sinner over and over again, and this performance was so haunting it gave me goosebumps. Eli has the guy helping with the service pour the holy water over Daniel, and Daniel feels a sort of spiritual release. Yet in the end he ends up telling Eli to say that he is a fake preacher and that God is a superstition. This goes against everything Eli taught people about faith and religion, and he says this over and over with Daniel goading him on to keep saying this.
It was interesting seeing the work that goes into producing oil. I take it for granted that I can just go to the gas station and fill up on gasoline, not knowing what kind of process goes into it. I learned about the big monopolies like Standard Oil in my U.S. history class, but it wasn’t until I saw this movie that I could really understand the process that goes into extracting the oil from the ground and also the potential injuries that could occur on the job (of course, there were probably no workers compensation suits back then). The music is pretty amazing, and I also like the lettering for the end credits. It gives the film its dark and serious drama nature. The film reminded me a little of The Lighthouse, a film from A24 starring Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe. I don’t know how to describe it, but just the dynamic between Robert’s character and Willem’s character reminded me of the dynamic between Eli Sunday and Daniel Plainview. The Lighthouse, if you haven’t seen it, is about two lighthouse keepers stranded on an isolated island in New England and they both drive each other up the wall. Like There Will Be Blood, it is also quite intense.
Towards the end, in a very chilling scene, Eli tells Daniel he wants some of the land Daniel has acquired for oil drilling so he can make money because he is financially strained. However, Daniel tells him that all the oil in that land has been used up and that he can’t give Eli that land that he badly wants. He and Daniel are constantly competing for these resources. The music really added to the suspense. There is one scene where the music has a col legno sound (col legno is when you put the bow stick on the string of the instrument and hit the string with the bow stick) mixed with strings and some sort of percussive beat. It didn’t have a set key signature and the way the rhythms responded to each other conveyed the suspense of the scene, sort of like the famous score for Psycho. It is where the oil rig burns down. In another scene, H.W. sets fire to Henry and Daniel’s lodging after going into his father’s bag and reading his journal with all his notes. H.W. doesn’t get away though because his dad catches him.
I sort of thought about “Diamonds from Sierra Leone” while watching this movie. The music video for that song features children working in a diamond mine mining diamonds and it shows them in the trenches doing this kind of grueling work, and we see one of the children holding a diamond and a white person picking up the diamond from above the ground. Again, I take it for granted I don’t have to think about where oil comes from. Now that I think about it, I’m now thinking about the OPEC crisis and all of our issues with coal, oil and natural gas, and gasoline shortages at gas stations. It makes me think we take so much of our natural resources for granted. I just jump in my car and don’t think about the environmental impact.
Also I had wanted to see the film for a rather irreverent reason: the famous “I drink your milkshake” scene at the end of the film. I kept seeing clips on YouTube where people mashed the scene with Kelis’s song “Milkshake.” One time I watched an interview with Paul Dano where he talked about how people started ordering him milkshakes after the success of There Will Be Blood, but that he could never drink them because he was lactose-intolerant.
Discover more from The Arts Are Life
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
The Arts Are Life 