The 25 Best Movies of the Century: No. 2 - 'There Will Be Blood’

0:28I'm Sean Fennessey. starring Daniel Day-Lewis, Paul Dano, Kieran Hines, a great number of other wonderful actors is going to be on our list right after this. This episode of The Big Picture is presented by Amazon Prime. You know how in every great holiday movie, there's that last minute scramble to make it all come together? From gifts to hosting essentials, Prime's fast shipping is always there for you during the holidays, especially when it's last minute and just can't wait. So if you need fast free delivery that saves the day, it's on Prime. Head to Amazon.com slash Prime to shop now. Okay.

1:05Well. Here it is. It's the Paul Thomas Anderson movie. Yeah. We've been waiting a long time. It's not number one. Listen. It's not. It's not. It was never going to be. Are we sure about that? Are we sure about that? I'm sure about that. Okay. And I think that most people who have engaged in the sport of guessing what the final movies on this list would be and the order in which they would be arranged. Yes. They've been saying, number two, there will be blood. Number one, boss baby. Yes. They have figured out that there is a different number one. And I guess close observers of the show will understand that this is a list between us.

1:47And so this is, you know, this got bumped up from three to two. In a different world, it could be number one, maybe on your list. it would be number one, but this is a collective list. It is. I do also want to reiterate, as we have said for the past 10 to 15 to 25 episodes, we have like passed the point of numbers, you know? We are beyond rankings. Post math. Yes, we are just here swimming in pure cinema. This is vibes. These are only vibes. There's no greater vibe than there will be blood to me. If this were my list alone, this would be my number one. This is to me the absolute pinnacle of 21st century filmmaking.

2:27Great many reasons for that. And we can talk about them here today. This film is shot as many of the PTA movies from this period were by Robert Elswit. Music is by Johnny Greenwood. It was a modest financial success. It made$76 million on a$25 million budget. It came after a long period off for PTA. He took a five-year gap between Punch Drunk Love and this film. And you can see it as a kind of evolution, a change in tone and style that I think kind it carries through today to the film that he released this year. A couple of data points on this movie. It is sort of based on oil by Upton Sinclair, a novel about the rise of the oil baron and oil proliferation in this country.

3:13Paul Dano, originally only supposed to have a small part in this movie, which I think is very notable for a variety of reasons we will talk about in this episode. But he was just supposed to play Paul Sunday, the character we see early in the film. Right. And the two brothers were not meant to be twins. and after the actor Kel O 'Neill was fired from the movie Dano slid into both roles pretty critical twist of fate there I would say I'm not saying the movie would have been unsuccessful if that had not happened but I do think we see it a little bit differently yeah Dano had four days to prepare for the role of Eli that sounds hard because he's playing an evangelical preacher opposite Daniel Day-Lewis they are different characters there are a lot of words in those speeches yes Dylan Frazier, the young boy who plays H.W.

3:58Plainview, Daniel Plainview, the oil baron's young son, not a professional actor, plucked out of a Texas school, never acted again. This is the only time he's ever been on screen. Just fascinating. The movie itself, I think most people listening know the story, but I'll share the shape of it just in case you have. If you haven't seen There Will Be Blood, I cannot believe you listen to this show, candidly. Ruthless silver miner turned oil prospector Daniel Plainview moves to oil rich California using his adopted son H.W. to project a trustworthy family man image. Plainview cons local landowners into selling him their valuable properties for a pittance.

4:33However, local preacher Eli Sunday suspects Plainview's motives and intentions starts a slow burning feud that threatens both their lives. So there's the obvious stuff about why this movie is considered a masterpiece and a thematic well full of black gold. Like there is a lot of - Pun intended. Yes, there is a lot of seepage on the surface, right? There is these two twin powers of the idea of America. There's money and industry, and then there's God and religion and the clash. Yes. And I like those things about the movie. I think they're well-drawn. I think they're properly overdramatic, you know, Big, grand, at times silly and preposterous.

5:20It's not my favorite thing about the movie. And I don't think it's the thing that distinguishes the movie. But you need something this big, I think, to leaven it with all of the other things that make the movie so enjoyable, in my opinion. Yes. It's taking on... I mean, this is Paul Thomas Anderson's capital I, like, important movie. and it is taking on the themes of, you know, America and capitalism and ambition and fathers and sons that, and, you know, California and like everything that is potent in his work, but also in quote unquote important film history. The legends loom large in like in this setting and in this movie.

6:08And it's a direct, not even response, but like it is Paul Thomas Anderson like cannibalizing all that came before him and making his own version of it. And so it needs to not just wear the clothes of everything that came before it, but like hit all the notes of great cinema for it then to be able to tweak it in all of the ways that Paul Thomas Anderson does and to make this movie not just, you know, a grand treatise on, you know, ambition in America and money, but also just like really discomforting, like fucked up gets under your skin movie about like a person and maybe a person who lurks in all of us, but also like maybe a person who doesn't.

7:00And there is, you know, whether you respond, like there's, there's an alienation to it that I think is a very powerful part of the film as well. But it has to be weird for... And it is weird despite being, you know, in the grand Western tradition. That's right. I think it has a lot of hallmarks of those kind of settler town Westerns and those big important period films about the evolution of something critical to the country. But it also is basically a gothic horror film and a comedy. And him very comfortably mashing those things up. I think you're right. I think he's, you know, ingesting John Ford and D.W.

7:40Griffith and John Houston and Terrence Malick and Michael Cimino. Like, all those directors and the kind of the vision of America that they had, the way that they saw the West is a part of this. But I don't feel their, like, tone or their, you know, sense of characterization in the same way. I think it's very different. I think there is something, like, simultaneously very funny and very malevolent in this movie. there's like a real darkness. One thing that struck me last night though, if we're just staying on some of the heavy theme stuff, I'm not sure if I personally ever read this movie as a post 9-11 movie, but I think it makes a lot of sense in that context.

8:19By making an oil movie while we're entrenched in all of these foreign wars in the aftermath of 9-11. And I'm not sure how much of that was Anderson's intention when he was putting the movie together, but his previous four films before this are all, you know, either relatively recent history or contemporarily set California, L.A. family stories. And this movie is much bigger, much more politicized, much more like potently politicized about systems. You know, like Boogie Nights kind of is a system movie, but it's all, it's like this much, much more of like a clubhouse family movie. And so it's interesting because he's like, through those first four films, he was so garrulous in interviews.

9:07He would talk so much about his movies and his intentions and what he was thinking. Right. And he kind of just stopped explaining himself when this movie came around. And so I think it lends itself to a lot of interpretation. And I do think there's something about oil being this like the ultimate corrupting force in the history of the country that in terms of its modernization and in terms of like the rise of a specific kind of capitalism, you know, like throughout U.S. history, There is like a long history of like socialism in certain segments of the population. And like once this starts to happen at the turn of the 20th century, a lot of that stuff starts to get scrubbed out of our society.

9:44And so I don't think that that is necessarily the overarching point of the movie. But I do see it in a slightly different way than when I saw it in 2007 where I was just so swept up in the grandeur, in the majesty. and like great movies can withstand this kind of thing, you know, where you're like, look at it from a slightly different prism. Even when we did the Rewatchables episode about it a couple of years ago, I wasn't really thinking about it that way. And maybe I see it a little bit differently in the light of day. I mean, do you think that it has anything to do with the fact that the last movie on our list was 25th Hour and is, you know, the 9-11 movie and in question?

10:19And we are thinking about without spoiling the last movie, though if you've been paying attention, you can guess it. You know, we've been thinking about them as a trilogy about our country and about America. And this, again, this is a very American list. We are children of Hollywood in the 80s and 90s. Like, we're sorry. We're sorry both for that. I'm not sorry. I'm sorry for America. Let me just put that out there right now. Yeah, you know. I think it was, I would say that we had like half intentionality, but also just half kind of assumed intent around this trilogy of movies. And this is the movie about the past, right?

10:55This is a movie about like the original sins and how we kind of got to where we got. And we saw 25th Hours, the kind of like the contemporary version of it when we were coming of age in New York at a certain time in our lives. And then the next film will be about the future. Right. But, and it's Blade Runner 2049.

11:15Denis makes the cuts. Congratulations to him. It's a really fun movie to kind of pick over because the story of America is unsettled. You know, like a movie that wants to be this big can can handle it. But I mean, it is a movie about America's past, but it is, you know, forever. Well, you said something interesting when you said that this man who's in the movie Daniel Plainview by Daniel Day-Lewis, who is this incredibly shrewd, evil, highly ambitious and accomplished oil magnate. that they're like we, maybe he's inside of us or maybe, maybe he's like, to me, he's more like he is the American character.

12:01You know, that's the thing of like, you're kind of, you're preached this, you know, unrelenting drive to succeed, to grow, to do more, to encroach upon literally more and more space. Well, you, you are the American man is, which I do think, you know, there is, this is a very, very male movie. What about the CEOs? What about the girl bosses? Are they not encouraged to do the same? Yeah. We're like 40 years too late, you know? And then as soon as anyone read their Slack messages, we got told to go away again. Yes. Not a lot of women in this film. No. It's not something that... But you know what?

12:39Probably accurate to the setting. I'm not saying it's a very male movie as a critique, but I do experience it as a... Like, you know, I don't watch this embodiment of the American ideal and think like, yeah, that's what I was taught to be. And maybe some of that is, you know, sociopolitical of, you know, my gender and time. And some of that is just me being like, that's a little much, like calm down, sir. Yeah. But I mean, he's a rageful, murderous psychopath. Well, not at the beginning. Well, we don't know. That's true. I guess that's true. I think that's part of the ingenious design of the movie.

13:20And we've been having conversations over the last five years about horror movies in particular and the way in which they feel the need to explain the events that take us to this point. And one thing that I find so rich about Daniel Plainview is we don't get a flashback where he gets bullied at nine years old. Or we see that he's a closeted gay kid and he can't express himself. So he has to take it out on the world. or we there are all these different ways you could be like well this is why Plainview is the way that he is the movie is not interested in that that would be a little bit too simple for a movie that I think has this kind of ambition in terms of what it's trying to communicate about its characters in the world at large I really like that about it I do as well I really like that it doesn't in Paul Thomas Anderson's head he may know everything or in Daniel Day Lewis's head when he was preparing the character he may have his idea of what it was and the movie even gives us moments where characters talk about the past when he says, I was working at geological research in Kansas and I had to get out of there and I don't like to explain myself.

14:21And then he stops talking. And it's one of the only times we really hear about his past in the movie. I like the idea of Lucifer just kind of landed on this country. I mean, I do as well. And I really, really appreciate the lack of explanation or really, I mean, that's just a responsive critique, right? To five, 10 years, not just in horror movies of us having to watch like the flashback original trauma scene. And we're like, mm-hmm, yes, it's very sad. Your dad was like mean to you. And I'm pretty sure that Daniel Planview's dad was mean to him based on everything I've seen in the film, but I don't need that shown to me.

15:02One assumes. I don't need to literalize it. What if his dad was really cool? Just like, and he just wanted to be Daniel's friend. Yeah. You know, and he was just like, do you want to go surfing? Right. But so when I was rewatching last night, I did that. Well, can we we'll come back to surfing in a second. I was watching the scene of him on the train with the with the baby in the basket. And the baby is just grabbing at his facial hair. And there is a I was like, is he evil right now? There is something very tender about that moment. Yes. and very, and to me is meant to lay the foundation of that this character feels something for this child.

15:46And there are a few other moments like that that to me suggest that it's not, you know, Deus Ex or like Lucifer Ex Machina. That, well, but, you know, that's my interpretation based on watching it last night and wondering about it. I think there's no doubt that Daniel Plainview has love for H.W., his adopted son. That he shows him affection in a way he shows no other person, that the only time he shows affection to another person is Mary because HW shows affection for Mary. And so the only person that he really has time for emotionally is his son. So it's not that he is Satan himself. I shouldn't say that.

16:22But I think what that's meant to show us is just how corrupting this level of power and wealth is, that he ultimately rejects his son and loses his son. And that even that love that he feels for him is not enough to sustain this just deeply disturbed and angry person. And I think that's pretty powerful because one, H.W. adorable, you know? I mean, just a really cute kid. Yeah, it's funny that you find this a funny movie because I find all of the H.W. stuff so upsetting that I just like I can't laugh throughout any of it. Like I not not once. Yeah, yeah. No, I burst into tears last night. The scene when H.W.

17:04is on the derrick and it explodes with the gas and then it leads to the fire, which is just truly one of the most extraordinary set pieces in movie history. I do not understand how they made that work. They built that from the ground up. There's tremendous effects work in that scene. But when you see that it's H.W. who's the one who's blown off and then the sound cuts out of the film, we know pretty quickly that H.W. has lost his hearing. and eventually his father retrieves him and carries him back to the mess hall and he lays him down and he's trying to communicate with him and he can't hear and he says I can't hear my voice and then when he gets up to leave to go look at the Derek and he says don't leave don't go that's crushing but I think that is the sign ultimately that what's most important to him is outside that HW is not most important to him yeah or he makes the choice in that moment yes and to me that's like great thematic storytelling that that is without explaining, like, I need to go see my well.

18:01You know, like, it's much more about what the characters are doing without discussing it and showing us where their priorities ultimately lie. I find PTA to be extremely good at this in his movies of using character action to explore and explain how they're feeling and what they're motivated by. Yeah. So I do think that the movie is very emotional and you're right. Plainview is not pure evil, but he's like a vessel for what can happen. Right. And like, that's the moment of him turning. And he keeps turning. I, you know, you wrote that you're also very affected, as am I, by the scene of Daniel leaving HW on the train when he goes off to school.

18:38And it mirrors the shot of them arriving in Little Boston, where you are on the train and watching them drive through the town. And then this time you're on the train and you suddenly are with Daniel in the car watching the train go by. I mean, it's really, really, really upsetting. But then I basically lost it at a scene, like a couple scenes later when the Kieran Hines character comes back from dropping him off. And Daniel's like, how big is his room? How big is his room? How big is his room? Which is incredible writing that communicates that there's like still, he's still concerned about something, but what he is concerned about is like an expression of what he values at the same time.

19:25so he can't quite let go and it's just a person losing their grip on, like on their value system in real time. Yeah, yeah. I mean, the idea that he feels that his son deserves accommodations, but he can only really understand it by way of dimensionality, you know, like there's not really, it's very powerful. When Paul came on the show, on Bill Simmons' show, and I talked with him then with Bill, he explained that he had a newborn child when he was making this movie. And I find that a lot of the relationship between Daniel and H.W. is informed by that crazy-making feeling when a baby just drops into the middle of your life.

20:09And that's how this story is explained. You know, H.W. is the son of a man who's killed working alongside Daniel. And Daniel just adopts him. And that is kind of what it's like when you have a baby. Especially for somebody who didn't carry a baby. Yeah, I was going to say, it's very different. First, there was no you and then you're here. Yeah. And it is the most important thing in the world to you. And these are ideas I find that are not explored about this movie as much. Like I opened this conversation with America and oil and God. But I think I'm most moved by it. It persists for me beyond that feeling I had where I was like, oh my God, I love this so much the first time that I saw it.

20:49Because it just gets deeper and deeper. Like you get a little bit older and some of the things still feel more powerful. Like cue two parents talking about, you know, parenthood in movies. But no, it is true that rewatching this a couple of times after having kids, what's funny, what's important, the points of emphasis like do shift and that's completely natural. It's interesting though, this to me, you're right that there is a literal like baby dropped into your life. You know, it is like, you know, baby boom, but for oil. Also a film about industry and commerce. Sure, I was going to say. And ambition and success.

21:30Great double feature. And I think that you're right that this is a pretty apt experience of what it's like to become a father. And this person just shows up. But at the same time, this film to me is still, I still feel like it's written by a son rather than a father, if that makes any sense. or at least someone who's still, who's most of his experience with that relationship is being the son instead of the father. And there are like three different son figures who are in there trying to figure out what's going on with Daniel and they can't quite. And obviously Magnolia is, you know, the father-son relationship from the son.

22:09Same with Boogie Nights. Yeah, exactly. Dirtiglar and Jack Horner, yeah. And this is the flex point. Yeah. And really the master is the flex point. And then, but it was interesting to think about that because certainly one battle after another, but his most recent movies are like from the other side. They're father movies. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's interesting to watch it shift. Yeah, I agree with you. I think it's also because the movie is so biblical. There's literally an Abel who is the father of two boys. You know, like there is this, there's a lot of these threads of this, the difficult relationships that grown men and their young children have and the ways in which they disagree and thrash and the way that that has like tremendous consequences on everyone around them.

22:54The movie is very clever about that. And it's also clever about like kind of the duality in all people, the idea of Eli and Paul being twins and what's split between them. And some of that is like happenstance. You know, the movie wasn't written to be that way. But then when you watch the movie, you're like, oh, this actually deepens my understanding of some of this stuff. so even if you just put aside all this big heavy thematic stuff that's coursing throughout the movie from a purely movie making perspective I it's quite good it is two thumbs up I'm trying to think of what's the right correct hyperbole like I wrote down total cinema and we've been making a joke about total cinema baby for a long time but when you consider the production design and the Greenwood scoring the film and just kind of going to another level this is his first film without John Bryan as the composer.

23:43And the long stretches, the building of the train and the derricks and the idea of the church operating in the shadow of the oil. And then you consider the cast. We can talk a little bit about Daniel Day-Lewis and maybe what this means. We did do the Daniel Day-Lewis Hall of Fame earlier this year with David Sims. And this was an auto green for him, obviously. He won an Academy Award for this performance. I believe it is the performance of the 21st century. I think that's true and fair. I do think you could make a case. Tell me what you think about this. That this is like the end of a certain style of acting or a certain style of like acting persona communication.

24:23The person who like completely turns themselves over to something and it not being ripe for mockery. You know, like it sounds like Daniel Day-Lewis was challenging on the set of this. Right. You know, because he was trying to embody Plainview all the time. And, you know, I think back to that New Yorker piece that Michael Schulman wrote about Jeremy Strong and how Jeremy Strong just kind of gets like pilloried for being too serious. And this was a time before pretension was mocked in the same way. I don't think it's the last time that Daniel Day-Lewis gets away with it because, you know, the Lincoln and talking like a read and then.

25:02But there was like a jokiness around the Lincoln thing. Sure. Even to the point of CR developing the bits, you know? And then I guess Phantom Thread is just, it's a lighter performance. And so. And feels closer to maybe just how he sounds and looks in the world sometimes. I guess so. Though he was like a 50s couturier. It's not, you know, it's, I mean, that's closer to him disappearing and making boots for a while. It is, but I just mean in terms of like his speaking voice and the energy that he's emitting as a creative person. Like this is like a, you know, mustachioed American demon. It's a very different.

25:39It's very far from who he actually is. Well, forever after this, you're always just there's no performance that is going to like exceed it. So you're always just in the shadow of it. And it's like someone doing their DDL and Phantom Thread, you know, and that's probably very good. but this performance looms the largest. It really does.

26:25Tic Tac Refresh your good vibes Ambition You mentioned that men are taught this Yeah I don't I'm not sure if that's true I think maybe it's communicated by the world Yeah Maybe that's it But no one sat me down and was like What you need to do is try really hard Then maybe it is just Communicated to your generation And the generations before But yeah, I do feel, you know, as we do this project of this podcast together, as well as 25 for 25, and also just observing, you know, you and my husband and all the other people. There's something expectation-wise about, like, ambition and chest beating that is communicated to you that it's not that I'm not competitive and it's not that I don't.

27:23want to be great, but it's expectation that I guess was not built in for women of my age. And so I feel freer than you do. Your expectation was barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen. I get it. I get it. Or marry a doctor. Yeah. That would have been great. I would have married a doctor. I don't feel that I would get along constitutionally with a doctor, you know? uh well we know you couldn't speak to a dentist so that's off the table completely um as far as daniel day lewis like communicating the ambition stuff i think that he is incredibly good at showing like this relentless drive and then not knowing really what to do with that drive and so of course he becomes an alcoholic and he is constantly looking for another person to use and another person to, you know, yell at and become frustrated with.

28:21He does have a few moments where he's kind of more vulnerable. The man who presumes, you know, announces himself as his brother comes into his life and he feels like he has someone for a moment that he can confide in and be a little bit more vulnerable, even if he's explaining how he doesn't like anybody in the world. Yeah. During that amazing scene, that scene is still so brilliant. But, you know, the men will build an oil empire instead of going to therapy. It does apply here. Like, this is a person who maybe if he just had one person he could really talk to might be doing a little bit better.