As Long as There’s Oil, There Will Be Blood (and an Oscar or Three)

Where Paul Thomas Anderson's previous films are layered with multiple characters, dovetailing conflicts and weird kawinkydinks, his latest is refined, focused, and real-life unsettling. There Will Be Blood, an adaptation of Upton Sinclair's ever-topical 1927 novel Oil!, is just as skillfully orchestrated as Boogie Nights and Magnolia, but resonates more than a big-dick or raining-frogs story ever could.

The slick black American gold that incites said bloodletting is the film’s indifferent spine. Oil captivates and possesses turn-of-the-century driller Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) just as it has every "oilman" and Texas politician since its discovery. Plainview’s relentless pursuit of the stuff—and the brutal, antisocial instincts it awakens—is the film’s bitter heart.

Day-Lewis' portrayal of the soulless, driven seeker is nothing short of incredible; the bile he oozes, then gushes, is Anderson's best writing, too. Case in point: The last scene of Blood, which fulfills—but not for the first time—its title's promise, ends with Plainview out of breath, coming down from a violent, raging high. "I'm finished!" he shouts, with an ambiguous mix of pride, sarcasm and irony. He got what he drilled for, but the resulting riches only iced his already cold heart. Comforting closure it's not.

Comfort is deliberately evasive in Blood, from start to finish. Anderson's writing and Day-Lewis' delivery (and black-hole eyes) aren't the only instruments of this thorniness—the film's music is bombastic, an ominous interrobang punctuating leisurely shots of hilly oil country and conspicuously missing from scenes of raw human conflict. You'll hear it, feel it, and notice the lack of it from the first scene—an otherwise peaceful establishing shot turned on its head with anxious danger! danger! strings.