There Will Be Blood (2007)
In writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson's Best Cinematography-winning,
brooding, turn of the century epic about a greedy, savage, and obsessive
quest for oil wealth in S. California:
- the astonishing portrayal of opportunistic, ruthless
oil man Daniel Plainview (Oscar-winning Best Actor Daniel Day-Lewis):
first in 1898 as a silver mine prospector who adopted an orphaned
boy named H.W. (Dillon Freasier) after a mining accident and then
connivingly bought 'quail-hunting' land from the goat farming Sunday
family in the area of Little Boston, California and began drilling
for oil
- the scene of the oil platform explosion and fire,
deafening H.W. with the blast
- the scene at the California ocean of Plainview realizing
that a man claiming to be his half-brother Henry (Kevin J. O'Connor)
from Wisconsin was an imposter - afterwards, he killed him by shooting
him in the head
- the masterful scene of Plainview joining the Church
of the Third Revelation, led by young crazed, charismatic evangelist
Eli Sunday (Paul Dano) - in which the oil man was humiliated and
forced to repeatedly and publically declare he was a sinner looking
for salvation: ("I am a sinner. I am sorry, Lord. I want the
blood. I've abandoned my child. I will never backslide. I was lost,
but now I am found. I have abandoned my child!"), to satisfy
member/land-owner William Bandy (Hans Howes) and acquire the right-of-way
to build a pipeline through his land
- the scene of Plainview's disownment of his deafened
son H.W. (Russell Howard), who decided to go into competition in
Mexico against his rich, profligate father - and was told about his
non-biological true origins: ("You're not my son...It's the
truth. You're not my son. You never have been. You're an orphan!...I
don't even know who you are because you have none of me in you. You're
someone else's. This anger. Your maliciousness. Backwards dealings
with me. You're an orphan from a basket in the middle of the desert.
And I took you for no other reason than I needed a sweet face to
buy land. Do you get that? So now you know. Look at me! You're lower
than a bastard. You have none of me in you. You're just a bastard
from a basket")
- the final scene in the two-lane bowling alley in
his California mansion in which misanthropic Plainview mocked and
vengefully berated and forced financially-strapped, deal-making Eli
to repeatedly confess: "I am a false prophet. God is a superstition," before
telling him he had already sucked the land dry of oil by drainage
("I drink your milkshake, I drink it up!") - and then bloodily
murdering him with bludgeoning blows from a bowling pin, with Plainview's
final words to his butler: "I'm finished"