Honestly, the first time I saw There Will Be Blood, I wasn’t quite sure what to make of it. The back of the DVD case said it was a battle of wits between an oil man and a preacher, and that didn’t seem to be quite accurate. It’s a quiet movie for long stretches, one where there arguably isn’t a lot of action. To be clear, there are moments where things happen, but much of the film seems to focus on Daniel Day-Lewis’s face as he is deep in thought over what’s going on and trying to build his business up to, well, as high as he can get it. This long film actually made me a little too intimidated to check out more of Paul Thomas Anderson’s other work.
Now, Anderson’s work is generally not for the casual filmgoer, and I basically had to learn to appreciate something like There Will Be Blood for the psychological character study that it is. All I knew before my first viewing was Day-Lewis’s Daniel Plainview was going to drink someone’s milkshake.
The film opens with Daniel Plainview, digging a hole as he mines for something alone out in the middle of nowhere. He finds some silver but breaks his leg in the process. He does manage to drag himself to a surveyors to get a claim, but that there tells you more or less everything you need to know about Daniel Plainview: he will bust his ass for wealth, even at the expense of his own health, and he will not let anything get in his way to acquire what he wants. As the opening scene plays out, his operation grows, he strikes oil, and then he’s touring around with his “son” H.W. (Dillon Freasier in the child roles, Russell Harvard as an adult), buying up more land rights and increasing his wealth. The thing is, as the film goes on, it becomes clear that Daniel’s wealth is something of a trap: other people want a piece of it, some more than others, and he’d rather not share with anyone the more the film drags on.
That would be where Eli Sunday (Paul Dano in one of his dual roles) comes into play. A preacher in the small town where Daniel sets up shop, he keeps pressing for money that Daniel may or may not have promised him for the church. Now, I said my DVD case said the film is a battle between Daniel and Eli. While Eli is the closest Daniel has to a personal antagonist in the film, Eli isn’t in the film as much as Daniel himself or perhaps even H.W. He disappears from time to time, only to emerge at whatever might be the worst possible moment to see what little leverage he has against Daniel. I don’t think it’s much of a contest. In fact, at the end of the film when Daniel says what he really thinks of Eli, he finds that Eli’s identical twin brother Paul (Dano in the other of his dual roles) was the smart twin. Paul appears early in the film, and was actually intended to be Dano’s only role before Anderson made a somewhat last minute decision to get Dano to play both brothers. Paul and Eli Sunday do not appear together at any point, and once Paul makes a deal with Daniel as to where there might be oil on the family ranch, he exits the film. It turns out Daniel had a good amount of respect for Paul: Paul made the deal up front, took the relatively small amount of money he was paid, invested it well, and was living comfortably while Eli kept coming back and looking for more despite the fact Eli didn’t really do anything to earn it. At least Paul got a finders fee.
And anyone who thinks Eli isn’t a con man needs only see the scene where he berates his father for not getting more of Daniel’s money at the family dinner table. It’s one of the few scenes in the entire film not to feature Daniel somewhere nearby, and it makes it perfectly clear that Eli is more into money than he is God despite what his parishioners might think. Eli’s, let’s call it blasphemy at the end of the film is a lot less surprising after that earlier moment.
But is Daniel’s murder of Eli?
Probably not. There Will Be Blood acts as an examination of what wealth can do to a man. Daniel is, from the looks of things at the start of the film, a loving father who takes offense when anyone suggests he isn’t. When an accident deafens H.W. as a child, he rushes to the boy and tries to comfort him. He’s seen playing with the infant H.W. early on. It is only when the adult H.W. makes a perfectly reasonable request to separate himself from the company to go prospecting on his own in Mexico that it comes out that H.W. is actually not Daniel’s biological son. Daniel had been hypersensitive to how people perceived his parenting up until then. But by this point, when Daniel is living alone (servants aside) in a giant house, and after the scare of a fraud posing as Daniel’s long-lost brother (and that guy was looking to just get a job, not necessarily to have half the Plainview fortune or anything), Daniel becomes increasingly isolated from, well, everybody. The already volatile man was a lot less stable without whatever loyal retainers and associates he had, and that included H.W.
And how interesting is it that H.W. marries Eli’s sister? The feud only extends to Eli and Daniel. Other members of the family seem to get along just fine. That said, I always figured H.W. represents some level of innocence. The money and power don’t really corrupt him, and unlike Daniel, he actually can settle down with a woman and maybe raise a family. Daniel never appears to have been married, lying early in the film that his wife died in childbirth…unless he isn’t, but the question was about H.W.’s mother, and Daniel’s having lost a wife and a baby before the film starts is an interesting idea. That said, I doubt it. Simple reason: marriage is, among other things, about sharing someone’s life with yourself. Daniel Plainview doesn’t share.
And so, yes, he would beat Eli’s head in with a bowling pin. He’s become increasingly isolated and paranoid, and after revealing he’d triumphed over Eli decades earlier, why not just kill him? He is, after all, finally finished.
NEXT: Apparently, now I am alternating family films I can find on Disney+. Be back soon for one of the most perfect endings to a trilogy, 2010’s Toy Story 3.
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