There Will Be Blood (2007) is directed by Paul Thomas Anderson and it's a loose adaptation of Upton Sinclair's 1927 novel Oil!
It's important to note that Anderson didn't set out to put Oil! on film. In his A.V. Club interview with Josh Modell, he likens the book to a "really good collaborator" rather than a source.
To be precise, Anderson used the first 150 pages of Sinclair’s 528-pages-long novel as the basis for his story.
Possibly the biggest surprise for There Will Be Blood fans who haven't read the book, though, is that the film's protagonist, oil man Daniel Plainview, isn't the villain. In fact, while Sinclair shows him to be as bad as any in the oil trade when it comes to stifling the workers, buying off the government, manipulating and browbeating the media, and bribing everyone in sight, he's left as a somewhat baffled and sympathetic figure, wily as hell but forced to such awful measures by a corrupt and corrupting system.(1)
“There was a tower of flame, and the most amazing spectacle — the burning oil would hit the ground, and bounce up, and explode, and leap again and fall again, and great red masses of flame would unfold, and burst, and yield black masses of smoke, and these in turn red. Mountains of smoke rose to the sky, and mountains of flame came seething down to the earth; every jet that struck the ground turned into a volcano, and rose again, higher than before; the whole mass, boiling and bursting, became a river of fire, a lava flood that went streaming down the valley, turning everything it touched into flame, then swallowing it up and hiding the flames in a cloud of smoke.”
Upton Sinclair (Oil!)
FILM ANALYSIS
The film opens with a masterful wide shot of American desert in 1898, a bleak unforgiving landscape, ''a geyser of fire spewing out of the earth, like an explosion from hell itself.''
We see a violent bright sun, no water, no town in the horizon, and Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) alone in that desert, mining, digging down into the earth for an as yet unknown treasure. The disharmonious musical score is effective, loud and uncentered it perfectly fits the scenery.
The first seventeen minutes of the film besides the sound effects, there is no dialogue, only a few noise and murmur in the background (Plainview’s words mean nothing until he has some measure of success.)
In this wide shot we hear a scream ''No!'', and see Plainvew broke his leg, and he crawls for miles, over hills in the desert to reach the town to claim rights to the property. Here, at the very begining, we learn something of Daniel Plainview- he is insanely ambitious and he is relentless in intent to obtain what he wants and doesn't quit until he fulfills his goals, whatever the cost is. Plainview here is the embodiment of what Ayn Rand would call the heroic industrialist.
We jump to 1902, where Daniel now has a successful chain of oil drills. He still walks with a limp, the broken leg never recovered. Still no words spoken. When one of his workers dies in an accident, he adopts the worker’s orphaned baby, named H.W. Not until 11 years have passed in the story do we finally hear Plainview speak, in the scene where he is attempting to persuade investors to give him a lease on some land to drill.
We learn that Daniel is a man of — not few words — only necessary words (unless he’s trying to get something from someone). Here he claims that he is “a family man” and that his son is his motivation in life, but we see that the child is just another tool of his trade (when the incident happens and H.W loses his hearing, Daniel quickly leaves him and seems more excited about his oil strike than he is worried about his own son being injured.)
We get an insight into this very rich figure - self-sufficient and misanthropic, Plainview understands moral codes as nothing more than obstacles that, through his willpower to ignore them, he can easily avoid.
As he describes himself in the film '', “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.”
For small towns that might be swept away by big oil companies, Plainview’s business tact seems more human, more reasonable than the alternative. Viewers of There Will Be Blood nonetheless see how Plainview has carefully designed his façade for maximum small town appeal; and while Plainview’s approach may indeed result in riches for these communities, that result is less an intended consequence of his business than a necessary evil. Eventually, Plainview is approached by Paul Sunday (Paul Dano), a sharp young man from a family of poor goat farmers who asks for $500 for information on a massive potential lease in the untouched territory of Little Boston. Impressed by Paul’s cut-and-dry negotiation, Plainview happily pays the asking price and without delay heads to Little Boston. There, he must negotiate with Abel Sunday (David Willis), Paul’s dim father. We also meet Eli Sunday (also Dano) for the first time; Eli is Paul’s identical twin and, in terms of sheer directness, Paul’s antithesis. More than Abel, Eli seems to understand the value of his family’s acreage in Little Boston; he asks for $5,000 upfront and another $5,000 after the oil begins pumping. When Plainview asks what Eli will use the money for, Eli replies it’s for his growing church, at which he posits himself a healer and vessel for God. Plainview looks at him, smiles, and says, “That’s good. That’s a good one,” as if to acknowledge that, like his own oil business, Eli too has created an enterprise for himself. They strike a deal.(2)
Eli is to become Daniel's worst enemy, he a pseudo-prophet, a charlatan, who preaches false doctrine of Christianity, and in a way he is just like Daniel. They both have enormous ambitions and they both want power,
two very different kinds of power, money and recognition, but both using people for personal gain.
Within weeks, Plainview has ripened the proposed land, asserting himself as the progenitor of this once-dead town, now thriving with employment, irrigation, a school, and agriculture because of his oil project. Long deprived of grain, Little Boston’s citizens now have bread on their table because of Plainview. Still, all is not without incident: a fatal accident occurs at the well and kills a worker, and another accident leaves H.W. deaf. Eli blames the incidents on Plainview’s refusal to allow him to bless the well. To be sure, Eli has become a spiteful adversary, and for this Plainview knocks him down in the mud, humiliates him, slaps him in the face, and declares, “I’m going to bury you, Eli.” (2)
There is another example of Daniel's humiliation towards Eli in the scene where Eli comes asking for money owed to him, Daniel refuses and attacks him "Aren't you a healer, and a vessel for the holy spirit? When are you coming over and make my son hear again? Can't you do that?" Eli tries to argue that everything bad that's happened (deaths, fire, H.W.'s deafening) has been punishment from God but it's lost on Daniel.
First, we must consider the metaphysical messages inherent to this film. A cursory analysis would suggest that all parties are guilty of wrongdoing. Daniel is selfish and manipulative, but more importantly, he is a liar. Even though he started out as the ideal of the industrialist hero, he is guilty of being dishonest with Abel Sunday in his deal to buy the Sunday Ranch. Eli is manipulative as well, but his actions are perhaps even more contemptible. While Daniel lies to others to get rich, Eli promises other eternal salvation, while only seeking self-aggrandizement. Since we should expect businessmen to be deceptive, we cannot really fault Daniel for taking advantage of naive individuals. But we should expect religious leaders to be at least sincere in their beliefs; never seeking only to manipulate others for personal gain. (4)
William Bandy's lot is the last portion of land Daniel needs to make the pipeline, and it's owner finally comes to speak with Daniel at the unfortunate timing of finding Plainview's murdered fake-brother. Bandy not only gives him the option of getting away with the murder, but also agrees to lease his land for the pipeline of Plainview joins Eli's church. Despite being awkward about the situation at first, Daniel agrees because his true belief is in money and business. Religion has no real power over him, it had no power over how he got his fortune or the demises that befell him on the way. Daniel can't be touched by faith, but he it damaged and weakened when Eli forces him to declare how he abandoned his child. This is where not faith, but Eli hustling his faith finally gets to Plainview. Though very brief, it definitely scars Daniel to know he has a big weakness in his son and possibly the only reason to slowly over the years destroy that tenderness towards H.W. (3)
The comparison of Faith and Market isn't what's going on, it's how considering one or the other equal or similar is a fallacy. Eli, and Bandy thing that religion will protect and serve them, Daniel know's it's just empty power. However that very thought process of Daniel allows him to be blindsided by Eli at the baptism. From there on out he needs to pay Eli back. Their next one on one happens years later, after Daniel has lost his weakness of H.W.. He can't necessarily cripple Eli financially, the market crash already did that, but what he can do is cripple him religiously. The last humiliation of making Eli scream that he's fake, his faith fake, God is fake, is Plainview's revenge for revealing his weakness through H.W.
The only thing left now is a pleading empty man who won't stop asking Daniel for help, and the only action left to end that is to kill Eli. (3)
''The vision of Daniel lurching towards Eli with a blunt object in his hands and striking him down with a crack to the skull has an eerie similarity to the opening sequence of Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey.” If you recall the events of that scene, at the Dawn of Man, we see a competition for the scarce resource of water. After one group is scared away, one individual discovers he can use a bone as a weapon to kill animals. At first, he uses this weapon to hunt for food, but then he uses this weapon against his competitors. In an act of animalistic violence, this first man using his first tool commits murder in order to gain access to scarce resources. Kubrick was making a darkly Hobbesian point about human nature: in a world of scarce resources, it is ultimately the threat of violence that carries the day, and the party with the biggest arsenal is the one who gets the biggest share of the wealth. Kubrick’s point is echoed in Daniel Plainview’s actions.'' (4)
EXTERNAL LINKS
Understanding the Cinematography of Robert Elswit
One Way To Deconstruct There Will Be Blood
Hidden Meaning in There Will Be Blood – Earthling Cinema
Also here is the whole scenario, if anyone wants to read it
https://docs.google.com/viewerng/viewer?url=https://www.dropbox.com/s/ybdvbechu7hxyct/There%2520Will%2520Be%2520Blood%2520shooting%2520script.pdf?dl%3D1&hl=en
(1)AV Club, Book Vs. Film: Oil!
(2) deep focus review, by Brian Eggert January 6, 2008
(3)reddit, There Will Be Blood
(4)There Will Be Blood and Philosophy