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GLENN KENNY'S REVIEW (posted 12/13/07)

No human presences are seen in the opening moments of this film; only shots of a sere, sun-baked, uninviting landscape. On the soundtrack, a string section keens, scurrying up a ladder of discord, reaching a crescendo of pure volume, and falling off. This activity heralds the coming of Daniel Plainview, who is in a hole in the lower ground of that uninviting landscape.

By the end of There Will Be Blood, Paul Thomas Anderson's entirely extraordinary fifth feature film, Plainview will inhabit another hole in the ground of sorts, a more lushly appointed one, one of his own design, but a hole nonetheless. In the first hole, he's a not particularly prosperous silver miner; in the last one, he's a hugely successful oilman.

Blood tells Plainview's peculiar, appalling story (which Anderson adapts from a portion of Upton Sinclair's novel Oil!) in a series of perfectly conceived and structured narratives, starting at the turn of the 19th century and winding up in the 1920s. Plainview's forays for silver become forays for oil. He acquires, through means we can only really piece together once the film is over, a son, a cute little fellow he uses as a prop when he wants to convince the people whose land he wants to drill into that he's both an oilman and a family man. And he lets the little fellow, named H.W. and played for the most part by Dillon Freasier, listen in on business meetings much of the time. Into one such meeting oozes a weedy young man named Paul Sunday (Dano), who has information for Plainview and Plainview's right hand man Fletcher (Hinds) about a stretch of California land that sits on top of a virtual sea of oil. Much of the rest of the film depicts Plainview's conquest of that land, and his frequent wrestlings with Paul's identical brother Eli, a preacher at the self-created Church of the Third Revelation.

Eli's constant demands for attention, respect, and money make him something of a querulous second son to Plainview. In the midst of their wranglings, H.W. suffers a mishap that alters his relationship to his father forever. A man claiming to be Plainview's brother arrives at the ever-expanding site, and the heretofore very definite but largely buttoned-up Plainview (who has no trouble revealing his ambitions to Fletcher in the first person singular, as if Fletcher has no stake in them — doesn't exist, even) opens himself to the man. "I have a competition in me; I want no one else to succeed. I hate most people. There are times when I look at people and I see nothing worth liking. I've built up my hatreds over the years little by little. I see the worst in people. I don't need to look past seeing them to get all I need. I want to earn enough money I can get away from everyone. I can't keep doing this on my own, with these... people." Soon Plainview will have reason to reconfirm his dislike of people. And he will also grow rich enough to get away from everyone, and stay there, until someone who once forced a humiliation upon him comes calling with hat in hand.