There Will Be Blood

My first reaction to Daniel Plainview was rejection. He is difficult to tolerate: cold, distrustful, aggressive and driven by an almost pathological need to dominate others. Yet that is where much of the power of There Will Be Blood lies. Paul Thomas Anderson never tries to make us admire his protagonist or provide a comforting excuse for his behaviour. He forces us to spend hours with a man whose ambition seems to grow at exactly the same rate as his inability to connect with other human beings.
Daniel Day-Lewis gives a monumental performance. There is something almost animalistic about Plainview: the voice, the posture, the way he looks at people and the permanent sense that he is calculating what he can get from them. At times the performance can feel excessive, but that excess also suits a character who always seems on the verge of becoming a caricature of himself. His presence completely dominates the film.
What is most interesting is that ambition is not presented simply as a desire for money. Plainview wants to win. Oil matters because it means power, but what truly seems to drive him is proving that nobody can stand above him. Financial success does not calm him; instead, it appears to intensify his contempt for everyone else.
That is why his relationship with Eli Sunday works so well. They are not simply opponents. They are two men obsessed with exercising authority from different positions: one through money, industry and ownership, the other through religion, community and influence. They need each other, yet neither can tolerate acknowledging power in the other. Every encounter becomes a battle of egos in which humiliating the rival matters almost as much as achieving anything practical.
Paul Dano holds his own remarkably well in that confrontation. His Eli is irritating and fragile at the same time. Against Day-Lewis's physical weight, he represents a different kind of domination, more theatrical and spiritual, but not necessarily less self-interested. Anderson does not present capital and religion as completely opposing forces, but as two systems capable of competing for the same people and the same territory.
The film also has enormous visual power. Robert Elswit turns the dry, open landscapes into something almost hostile, while oil appears as a promise of wealth that ultimately stains everything. Certain images seem to speak for themselves about progress, exploitation and destruction without needing much explanation.
Jonny Greenwood's music contributes enormously to that sense of threat. It does not accompany the film conventionally; it unsettles, anticipates tension and turns certain moments into something almost abstract. The film constantly feels as though it is about to break apart, as if violence were waiting underneath every conversation.
Its length is noticeable, and there are moments when sustaining that level of intensity for so long becomes exhausting. I can also understand anyone who sees a certain grandiosity in Day-Lewis or in the film's style itself. But even when it overreaches, there is such a strong personality behind it that it remains difficult to look away.
What stays with me most is the idea of a man who acquires more and more while seeming to be left with less and less. Wealth does not fill the emptiness, competition never ends, and dominating others cannot replace having a genuine relationship with them.
There Will Be Blood is dark, uncomfortable and occasionally grotesque, but also deeply fascinating. It does not move me as much as other great films because its protagonist always maintains an unpleasant emotional distance, yet that discomfort is part of its identity. It is the portrait of ambition turning not into a form of success, but into a form of isolation.