He reinvents himself, transforming from simple prospector to self-made oil man, and becomes brutally competitive as success breeds greed for power and control. Sinclair's oil tycoon James Arnold Ross is renamed Daniel Plainview for the film and the drama turns on his relationship with an adopted son and his struggle with evangelical preacher Eli Watkins (Eli Sunday in the film).Īnderson's film begins with Plainview as a driven, solitary prospector attempting to dig his way to the American dream by mining for gold when he ends up with a gusher. It's loosely based on Upton Sinclair's novel Oil!, though Anderson focuses solely on the first section of the novel ("the first 150 pages," he told interviewers). Top 71 Things I Love About There Will Be Blood (th.The fifth film by Paul Thomas Anderson reworks the American entrepreneurial success story as a frontier myth turned robber baron drama.And Eli and that talk about religion, I'm sure that might have been a very interesting talk! Reply Delete Also love those scenes with Mary and the fire shots. And that shot that Tarantino mentioned is amazing. I love the fact that you've chosen some of the moments of Daniel's interactions with the kid. She was talking about Dano, and man I loved him so much in here, he's such a great actor too, I've been following his career since I watched him in here. But funnily enough she also told me that Day-Lewis was as perfect as always, but that there was this "new" kid who left her speechless. Don't remember why we didn't go to watch it when it was on cinemas because I remember we both thought the trailer looked great. My mother loves Day-Lewis' acting and she passed on that love for him on me so I remember one night when I was in college she called me and said: I just watched this film on TV and you need to watch it asap. This one is the first one I watched from Paul Thomas Anderson after Boogie Nights and I thought it was a masterpiece. What unfolds then makes sense: Eli descending into the underground den to wake up a slumbering fiend? I couldn't see any other outcome. The fact that he was a raging alcoholic by then helped. His lashing out at HW in the end is a sign of someone who had invested what little emotional capacity he had into a single person and reading betrayal in that single person's desire for independence, a classic: you don't reject me, I reject you. I think I'm in the minority who believes Daniel did not want to be left alone just as he claimed: though wary of Henry at first, he nevertheless embraced him as his half-brother as soon as he was sufficiently convinced, after which the two were almost inseparable.Īnd then there's HW's absence after he was sent away, which remained a sore spot with him, viscerally so, given how he reacts with emotional violence every time the subject is brought up when he could have dressed it up in a positive light and pretended to look after his son by sending him away to school if his image as a family man was his concern. Still as good as I remember it, if not better now that, thanks to this post, I've started to notice more things I've seen the ending before but on second viewing still reacted to it as if I've seen it for the first time. I had to watch the movie again after this post, as I've done with many movies after going through similar posts and lists.
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