Bloody well right

First off, let’s get one thing clear, there’s not any significant amount of bloodshed in There Will Be Blood, the fifth film from Paul Thomas Anderson. Not compared to the nearly dozen murders in No Country For Old Men. Sure there are a couple of people who get, shall we say, whacked, but the blood in There Will Be Blood also refers thematically to oil as blood in the Earth, and the blood between brothers exists as a type of loyalty bound by love. Only there are no characters on display here who love or who you’ll want to love.
Perhaps that’s one of the magical cinematic touches that Anderson brings to his idiosyncratic adaptation of Upton Sinclair’s novel Oil – he makes you care about the organic substance of the story rather than the people who inhabit that world. The editing is concise to the point where you’re expecting an explosion but when it finally goes off the timing catches you by surprise. You expect to be inundated with a typical turn of the century soundtrack yet are confounded by Jonny Greenwood’s unconventional violin wailing. (There’s some Arvo Part in there too, tasty stuff.)
There Will Be Blood was shot on location around Marfa, Texas in some of the same places that No Country For Old Men was shot. Yet, there’s no similarities to the look of the two films, the landscapes in TWBB are either sun-drenched, or shot in low natural light (or so it seems) and evoke the sense of a one-street town built around the train station.
Likewise the film’s built around the character of Daniel Plainview and Daniel Day Lewis has found a cadence that suggests another age. Maybe there’s a hint of Jack Palance gravel in Plainview’s voice or a leer of John Huston’s stink-eye in Day Lewis’ mannerisms. Then again maybe it’s one of the most stunning performance given in an American film in some time. Enough time that years will elapse before it’s outdone.