Film Screening: There Will Be Blood (2007)

Speaker(s): Natalie Deam

 Inspired by Upton Sinclair’s novel Oil!, There Will Be Blood takes on the myth of the American dream by following the cruelly ambitious Daniel Plainview in the oil boom of the turn of the century. Anderson’s epic covers a span of thirty years, over which Plainview’s drive to establish a legacy grows to monstrous proportions across a series of conflicts with competing business interests, family emergencies, and an evangelical preacher determined to realize his humanity. With unforgettable performances by Daniel Day-Lewis and Paul Dano, an unsettling score by Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood, and the harsh historical landscape of a country still in the making, There Will Be Blood well deserves its nomination among the best films of the decade.