There Will Be Blood

In turn-of-the-century California, an oil prospector (Daniel Day-Lewis) rises to prominence.

There Will Be Blood is proof that John Huston is, indeed, alive and well. Writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson channels Huston the writer and director, while Daniel Day-Lewis channels Huston the performer. Together they create an intense, visionary, experience of a film.

While Anderson’s film most echoes Huston’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, the brilliant opening sequence also evokes Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, and several shots also bring to mind John Ford’s The Searchers. That Anderson is able to assimilate all these influences so confidently is truly astounding. This film isn’t a pastiche; it’s an evolutionary leap that announces Anderson as the premier filmmaker of his generation.

In the end, There Will Be Blood is an utterly uncompromising vision of the power of greed. There’s no happy ending, no fitting moral resolution, only an unflinching look at the darkness within us all. The film is so arresting, so relentlessly engrossing, that it resonates long after the credits finish rolling. Despite its bleak nature, there’s something almost therapeutic about it, as if, like oil from the earth, Day-Lewis’s Daniel Plainview can somehow extract the darkness from within us.