Despite it's resolution, it's still a revelation

Rating: 9/10 (17 January 2008)

Paul Thomas Anderson and Daniel Day Lewis are two of the most talented men working in film today, that is unarguable.
There Will Be Blood is stunning and meticulous in it's treatment of a different time and place, where people needed ambition in order to survive. The film is a spectacle of emotion and it's toll on the human spirit. Lewis' Daniel Plainview is one of the most absorbed, frighteningly unpredictable men the cinema has ever given us. He's at best a caring "father", and at most a greedy, psychotic madman. His story is as shadowed as his intentions.
But by the end Plainview is so vile, so overwrought, so full of disdain that he has absolutely no redeeming qualities left in him which caused me to feel a slight dislocation with him.
In the beginning Daniel Day Lewis gave his character ground and depth to feel real. He was wildly exotic but human in his softness and spirit...until the last act where I feel as though the film derailed into sophomoric delusion leaving Plainview in an abyss of his former self.
Granted time had passed, and lives had changed, but the last scene is like a different world where the same character talks and walks in, but doesn't necessarily feel the same.
Its a shame that all we're left with in the end is a caricature of Daniel Day Lewis' madness, and the tortured soul which forever burdens him...and us.
And yet the first two thirds of There Will Be Blood is some of the most fevered pieces of American Cinema you'll see all year.
8/10