There Will Be Blood: The Competition In Him
"I have a competition in me. I want no one else to succeed. I hate most people.
"Daniel Plainview · There Will Be Blood · 2007
Runtime
158 minutes
Director
Paul Thomas Anderson
Budget
$25 million
Box office
$76.2 million worldwide
Score
Jonny Greenwood
Two Frauds In One Valley
Anderson took roughly the first third of Upton Sinclair's 1926 novel Oil! and threw the politics away, keeping only the ground and the men standing on it. What is left is a film about two men selling the same thing to the same poor congregation. Daniel Plainview sells the future as bread, roads and a school. Eli Sunday sells it as salvation. Each needs the other's audience and neither believes a word the other says. The engine of the film is not oil money but the fact that both men are right about each other. Plainview's son is introduced in the opening minutes as a business asset, a face to put beside the word family in a sales pitch, and the whole tragedy follows from a man who can only understand love as a competitive advantage he has been forced to fake.
Watching There Will Be Blood
Dread
/
Act
Jonny Greenwood's score was ruled ineligible for the Academy Award because it reworked his own earlier concert music, so the decade's most imitated film score could not compete.
Robert Elswit shot it around Marfa, Texas while the Coen brothers were filming No Country for Old Men nearby, and smoke from the burning derrick drifted across their set.
How It Landed
The film opened to reviews reaching for Citizen Kane and Greed, then lost Best Picture to No Country for Old Men, the other Texas oil country film of that year. Daniel Day-Lewis won Best Actor and Elswit won Best Cinematography. Its standing has climbed ever since. In 2017 the New York Times critics named it the best film of the century so far. Anderson made it after Punch Drunk Love and it marks the break in his career, the point where the ensemble sprawl of Boogie Nights and Magnolia gave way to films built around one unknowable man and a landscape that outlasts him.