"I've built up my hatreds over the years, little by little."

Rating: 10/10 (26 June 2008)

The first hint of Daniel Plainview's unheralded villainy comes when he snubs Preacher Eli Sunday's request to perform a blessing upon the strike of the local oil well. You already have a sense of it as Plainview plies the unsophisticated rubes with a pittance compared to the value of their underground wealth. Those scenes conjure up ideas of what it must have really been like during the heady days of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century robber barons. Greed and power, pure and simple, taken well beyond the measure of Humphrey Bogart's character in "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre" which director Anderson watched faithfully prior to his filming of this modern masterpiece. If you need only one reason to watch this film, it would be Daniel Day Lewis' excruciatingly sinister performance as the oil baron Plainview, setting a new low in human depravity with his 'You're just a bastard from a basket' speech to adopted son H.W. (Dillon Freasier). But unbelievably, he tops even that with the 'I drink your milkshake' tirade against preacher Eli (Paul Dano). Brilliant in it's intensity and yet unmistakably devoid of any sense of human decency and compassion. It's as if he were describing himself when in an earlier scene, Plainview maintains that "There are times when I look at people and I see nothing worth liking". "There Will Be Blood" is an intense and tumultuous character study of a man bent on personal success, whose methods and motivation can only result in personal failure as deeply devastating as the fortune he amassed.