http://blog.nationmultimedia.com/betweentheframes/2008/03/25/entry-1
Excellent films hit viewers where it hurts and they have to engage a
part of our life. This often happens in subtle ways, but the overall
rhythmical succession of the film must speak to our reality. Through
brutality, selfishness, savagery, and violence, Paul Thomas Anderson
comes out swinging after a five-year hiatus with the inflammatory
"There Will Be Blood" and delivers exactly that kind of film.

Adapted, with a great deal of departure, thematically and otherwise,
from Upton Sinclair's garrulous 1927 novel "Oil!", the story covers a
thirty-year span in the life of Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis),
who begins as a lonely silver miner in 1898 and winds up as one of the
richest, and craziest, tycoons in early-twentieth-century California.
Much of the first part of the story is given over to raptly silent
passages of physical effort, with men lifting, hauling, pounding, and
working silently in the muck and adhesive slime. It is about the
driving force of extreme capitalism as it both creates and destroys
the future, and its tone is at once invigorated, exhilarated, and
sickened. Plainview's great antagonist is a young man, Eli Sunday
(Paul Dano), who thinks he has the word of God within him, and who
creates, in the oil fields, the revivalist Church of the Third Revelation.

Anderson proves that a great film "must" make people see with new
eyes, and he has done it with grand scope and a knack for detail. He
has shown himself to be a master of imagery and motion. The film's
cinematography subtly exhibits a father forcing milk down his son's
dry throat, an arthritic woman dancing when she is healed, dark clouds
signaling the shadow of the oil business moving in, a son watching his
father abandon him from a train car pulling out of the station, dirty
hands striking a match, and impish figures wrestling in mud and oil.
In the film's first moments, the discovery of oil is met with a baby's
cries. Shortly after, Daniel Plainview asks about a swath of
$6-an-acre land with a gleam in his eye: "Can everything around here
be gotten?" Daniel Plainview is a man running on pure greed, and the
common thread of its devastation weaves its way through every inch of
this movie.

What cannot be ignored is the film's treatment of the church. Eli
Sunday, the Spirit-led preacher at the Church of the Third Revelation,
is Plainview's only true competitor. Into the mad race for oil enters
the imagery of the church: baptisms, false prophets, superstitions,
and most acutely felt, the covering of blood.

Anderson portrays the most devastating evil in Day-Lewis's character,
and the method actor extraordinaire Day-Lewis demonstrates how he is
the Olivier of his generation. Every great story runs on the oil of
well-devised characters. And in this one, Day-Lewis' character Daniel
Plainview is the mad, pulsing heart that drives the story along. The
entire work revolves around his magnificent performance of a man who
will stop at nothing in his quest for success in the oil industry.
Day-Lewis lowers his chin slightly, and the dark eyes dance with
merriment as he speaks in full, coarse, and rounded tones. It is the
voice of dominating commercial logic, an American force of nature.
Day-Lewis' Plainview is a deeply antisocial person ("I hate most
people"), refusing to trust anyone other than himself. Day-Lewis'
performance is akin to a knockout roundhouse kick to the head. The
actions here speak more clearly than words would. Viewers know what
kind of man he is when the ladder of the silver mine he's working on
collapses while he's climbing it, and he falls to the base, breaking a
leg and maybe a few ribs. Plainview claws his way out of the pit and
then crawls his way back to civilization.
He is a plain-speaking oilman. As he buys up oceans of oil in
California, he appears chivalrous, reasonable, wise, and a gentleman's
gentleman. He is a brilliant community developer. He meets people
holistically, with bread, crop cultivation, employment, and education.
He is totally accommodating, convincing, and winsome. Then he turns
around and says this: "I have a competition within 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." Daniel says at one point –
that's his religion. Viewers know that feeling. Day-Lewis' shows in
gross measure where Plainview's greed and competition lead: murderous
insanity. Through Plainview's crippled glory, the film encapsulates
both a lament and a gross celebration of twenty first century greed
and nihilism. In the film's climax, the oilman Plainview tells his
antagonist, preacher Eli Sunday, that he drinks "the blood of the
land" every day. There's something to that symbolism. Most of this
man's transgressions are subterranean, lurking out of view of the
public he needs and secretly despises. As things start to go wrong,
Plainview's heart seems to go as black as the oil he mines.

Though Day-Lewis is phenomenal, the real discovery is Dano, who
matches his highly pedigreed costar in scene after scene. His
performance as Eli Sunday is both shocking in its fervor and
terrifying in its believability. When he heals a member of his church
by casting Satan out of his congregation while screaming and shoving
and shaking, it seems, with dramatic irony, like he's the one
possessed by a supernatural force, not the woman with the achy hands.
Sunday's Church of the Third Revelation is the setting for many of the
best scenes, including Plainview's reluctant baptism, where Sunday
confronts him about his mistreatment of his son. Eli, like Daniel, can
be viewed as a nightmare archetype of American hypocrisy. His false
piety is matched by Daniel's personal code. In the film's ironically
frightful pinnacle, Daniel, in order to secure a business deal,
undergoes a baptism, viciously presided over by Eli. While Plainview
is a character of rigid menace, Eli must be a force to behold. A
passionate, bombastic, egotistical fifteen year-old with a "Jesus
complex", he has several scenes that will chill you the bone because
Dano has a role on his hands that could very well transform him into
one of the most recognized actors of his generation. Eli represents a
corruption of power, which is religion in this case as he bends an
entire community to suit his will, his frenzied rants and threats of
damnation making him a figure to be feared.

Because Sinclair's novel was about capitalism versus socialism and the
added ingredient of religion, Anderson's liberty to depart from that
aspect has set up a kind of allegory of development, in which the two
overwhelming forces, entrepreneurial capitalism and evangelism, build
Southern California together and then, inevitably, fall into combat.
Their final confrontation goes as far over the top as one of
Plainview's gushing wells. This can be further viewed as an allegory
of American development in which two overwhelming forces,
entrepreneurial capitalism and evangelism, both operate on the border
of fraudulence as well.

Though Anderson has publicly declared that he didn't intend for his
movie to be a political piece, you cannot believe every word every one
says. Take a step back and think about the whole story as directly
related to the United States' relationship with the Middle East.
Google the word "H.W." and the first thing you will find is "George H.
W. Bush" (George Herbert Walker Bush). Then read the film's official
tagline "When ambition meets faith". Now connect the dots and you will
see the engagement in a strong subtext of political allegory here.
With a film about an oil tycoon set at the intersection of industry
and religion, you can put both Bush 41 and 43 in the film's context.
Like Plainview and son H.W., the Bush father-son team also made their
millions in the oil industry, and control of the black gold has
resulted in actions that mirror Plainview's, only on a much larger,
global scale.

At the same time, however, the film's subtext speaks of the triumph of
business over religion, which is certainly contradictory to the
current state of affairs in Bush's America, where the two have become
increasingly intertwined. When Plainview first speaks to the people of
Little Boston, he employs standard political rhetoric ("the children
are the future") and then unsurprisingly fails to follow through on
his promises. After successfully obtaining the land from the pious
Sunday family and cheating them out of a fortune, Plainview becomes
something of an authority figure over the community, having power such
that he can put an end to the beatings that patriarch Abel Sunday
inflicts on his youngest daughter Mary for not praying enough, the
first of his triumphs over faith, which will continue for years until
he announces "I'm finished" after snuffing out the final vestige.

Here, Anderson doesn't play favorites, though. There's equal
corruption on both sides, and neither Daniel nor Eli are particularly
worthy of our sympathy. Daniel's contempt for Eli's church is
perceptible and palpable, but he has to play the game, which includes
public humiliation, in order to achieve his goals. Eli will in turn do
the same thing. Not only can the final confrontation be interpreted
simply as one man versus another, but they also represent something
greater. Eli is a charlatan, and a self-confessed sinner. Daniel's
destruction of the false prophet does not merely constitute the
fulfillment of biblical prophecy.

"There Will Be Blood" is a beautiful and horrific account of a man so
nauseated by the hypocrisy around him that his only option is to
embody the very same characteristics. From its dialogue-free first 15
minutes, to its bowling-alley conclusion, Anderson's latest
masterpiece is nothing short of distressingly brilliant. This
enthralling and powerfully eccentric American epic is a perfect movie
that succeeds in what it sets out to do because it grabs you and
doesn't let you down.