Story vs. plot in There Will Be Blood

Ask 100 writers on the difference between story and plot and you'll get 101 different opinions. Here's how I define the two: plot is whatever the characters consciously concern themselves with. Story is a layer deeper: the characters' emotional journeys witnessed from our privileged perspective as the audience. While story is more essential, the two are interdependent, and their relationship is fluid depending on the movie. A whodunit crime thriller is bound to be plot-heavy with the story playing backdrop. A typical romantic comedy will have a simple plot, with maybe a handful of turning points amidst the laughs and tears we really came to see. This difference is usually noticeable in dialogue -- more plot requires more exposition, while less frees up space for comedy, anecdotes, introspection -- whatever the writer wants his audience to experience.

There Will Be Blood falls decidedly on the story side of things. Filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson can afford to keep the plot simple, with sparse dialogue (including an essentially silent 15-minute opening sequence) because there’s other stuff he wants us to enjoy, like the magnificent David-Lean visuals of the American west and towering performances from his leads. When you’ve got arguably the best actor of all time in Daniel Day-Lewis it must be an easy decision to let him dominate your movie, and that’s exactly what we get from the time we meet oil barren Daniel Plainview in a lonely, dangerous silver mine, to the arrival of his opulent mansion 30 years later. But this movie is not about Plainview's acquisition of incredible wealth. Let’s call that the plot. It’s about his unfulfilled desire for familial love. That’s the story and it’s what keeps us riveted for 158 minutes.

Plainview begins a smart, tough, self-reliant and overall impressive man. Credit Anderson for not condemning his capitalistic ambition as could be expected in a 21st century context. He is also open-hearted, as his caring relationship with his adoptive son H.W. demonstrates, and enjoys describing himself as a "family man." But as he's faced with life-altering decisions he grows into someone else. His son suddenly struck deaf by the first gush of oil on his new property, Plainview abandons him against cries of “don’t leave” to survey his flaming derrick. It’s a subtle but telling choice in a heated moment — his oil over his son, whom he soon ships away. Later Plainview dares to open his heart again to his once-estranged brother, whom he takes in and even confides in as a potential business partner, only to again get burned when he learns the man is an imposter. Another potential heir lost, he makes another fateful choice: to murder him. Interesting note: the shooting script makes clear that Plainview is impotent, (explaining the film’s unorthodox lack of a love interest), but Anderson left this extra bit of plot on the cutting room floor.

Plainview takes refuge in that he answers to no one… or does he? He treats his antagonist, town pastor Eli, with the same indifferent disdain he would assumedly treat God -- save for a now-iconic scene when his business interests lead him to Eli's church. Faced with only one path to building an oil pipeline — the key to unfathomable wealth — Plainview must be baptized, and as Eli implores him to answer for his moral failings, his divergent desires for both family and wealth are forced into direct conflict. He crumbles, shouting “I abandoned my child! I abandoned my boy!” powerfully enough for us to speculate that he is a changed man. He's arrived at yet another choice: will he emerge from the baptism redeemed? We don’t have to wait long for the answer. Before it's even over he mutters under his breath: “pipeline.” ...So much for that. This audacious, hilarious, tragic moment — the best in the movie — seals his fate. (Another interesting note: this line isn't in the shooting script. Whether it was written on set or improvised by Day-Lewis, who knows?) By the third act Plainview's wealth is solidified but irrelevant — everything boils down to his relationships with his son and with Eli, and Anderson only needs a scene for each to resolve. After banishing his son, he murders Eli. Now he really has no one to answer to.

Afterthought: there’s another endlessly-discussed filmmaking dichotomy: business vs. art. I touched upon it when I wrote about Richard Linklater’s Everybody Wants Some, and with another auteur like Paul Thomas Anderson at the helm of There Will Be Blood, it’s worth asking again: as a filmmaker, should you follow your artistic instincts or work to please the audience? Anderson’s movies generally indicate he prefers the former, at times to his movies' detriment. He seems intent on drowning Inherent Vice in mumbling plot, and subjects his viewers to three hours of melodrama in Magnolia before its fantastic climax. But There Will Be Blood, which Anderson loosely adapted from the Upton Sinclair novel Oil!, is more considerate of its audience, demonstrated by, among other things, the absence of needless plot. Maybe it’s no surprise then that it’s Anderson's most commercially successful film. I’d also call it his best.