I find your lack of faith disturbing...

Rating: 9/10 (27 February 2008)

I bet this was a difficult one to sell; a three hour epic about an oil prospector prowling through turn-of-the-Century California where the lead character is as rotten to the core as they come. Yet There Will Be Blood is not a difficult one to watch and hopefully, in the wake of all the Oscar furore and a well-deserved Best Actor win for Daniel Day-Lewis, more people will be encouraged to go see a film that is fast on the way to becoming a modern American classic.
Day-Lewis of course is the heart of darkness around which There Will Be Blood revolves. He plays Daniel Plainview and when we are first introduced to the man, he is alone in the desert digging for silver. He is covered in dust and grime, a sun-bleached man with nothing to his name bar the pick axe in his hand and the bags of blasting Dynamite. That is of course until he strikes oil and his fortunes begin to change. Years pass and Plainview is now a made man, a respected oil tycoon who travels the country with his adopted son HW (Dillon Freasier) offering his services as a businessman promising to expand the fortunes of any community who he believes to be sitting on top of untapped oil reserves. Out of the blue he is visited by an impoverished farmer's boy named Paul Sunday who leads him towards an isolated town where black gold practically gushes from the rocks. Plainview sets up shop and begins drilling, but as he slowly makes his fortune, the lives of everyone around him come to be adversely affected. Daniel Plainview is no bringer of prosperity, he is a man looking to bleed the Earth dry.
Needless to say, Daniel Day-Lewis inhabits every inch of the man and puts in yet another brilliant performance in a career that has been built on them. Plainview is given no back-story ("I don't like to talk about such things...") but he is still a captivating presence. His eyes glimmer with Vampiric greed, his voice is a deep Southern drawl and his body language so imposing that he is an intimidating sight, even in the dialogue-free first fourteen minutes where the root of his fortune is revealed. Barely a second of the film goes past where he isn't on screen but he is so naturally magnetic that even given the three-hour duration, you still want it to continue past the darkly-comic finale. Day-Lewis's recent Oscar win was entirely justified and should you need further convincing, pay attention to the scene where Plainview confesses his hatred of humanity to his brother Henry (Kevin J. O'Connor), an exquisitely grim exchange that merely hints at the darkness within him yet provides the most illuminating snapshot we will get.
As his wealth escalates though, his soul deteriorates and he comes into conflict with the town's boy Preacher Eli (Paul Dano) and it is in the confrontations between them that There Will Be Blood is at its finest. Eli is no beautiful flip-side to Plainview by any stretch of the imagination; he is a flawed and weak man whose faith in the Lord gives him the strength to command his flock to acts of reverent worship, yet cannot provide him with the intestinal fortitude to truly challenge the oilman. Their final face-off in the midst of the great depression is breathtaking and wrought with nods to some of Kubrick's more absurdly humorous moments, Capitalism and faith colliding head on.
Magazines like Total Film in the UK have likened Plainview's story to Orson Welles's masterpiece Citizen Kane but There Will Be Blood is no mere imitator. Kane built a fortune and lost his soul in the process, but you could easily argue that Plainview had no soul to lose in the first place. When his son is deafened in the oil-eruption centrepiece at the half-way point, Plainview carries his son to safety then abandons the infant with a colleague to watch the derrick catch alight and he gazes on the inferno until dawn arrives. This is an outstanding film, a mesmerising sermon on money, faith, family and the madness that lies just beneath the surface, waiting to be tapped.