Flawed masterpiece

Rating: 10/10 (12 February 2008)

There Will Be Blood was a memorable viewing experience and like Apocalypse Now, I'll remember this as a classic epic but ultimately a flawed masterpiece. A gripping film from the start although the first words aren't spoken until 12-15 minutes into the film, this is essentially a character study of a greedy prospector sacrificing everything for money and power and in the process losing any vestige of love or humanity that may have existed in some dark recess of his soul.
Visually, the film is stunning. The attention to period detail in the dusty oil towns, the clothes, the oil derrick is perfect. Daniel Day-Lewis, great actor that he is, gives his career best performance as Daniel Plainview - a charismatic, conniving and determined man who we find at the start of the film (1898) working alone in a silver mine. The film charts his rise (and fall) over the next 29 years and his many clashes with Eli Sunday, a evangelical preacher who to Plainview is simply a false prophet, God being merely a superstition for the materialistic oil-man. Daniel Day-Lewis's performance holds the film together and the closest film I could compare it to is DeNiro in Taxi Driver, another fascinating character study.
There Will Be Blood has its fair share of violence and amorality with lives lost in oil wells, a blow-out deafening Plainview's son, and of course Plainview's clashes with Sunday. The first physical clash is completely unexpected and shocking as Plainview becomes increasingly drunk and nasty through the course of the film. The second is almost comical and Lewis' best piece of acting in the film - when practicality has to bow before the church. The last, in the end, is what destroys the authenticity and gripping power of the preceding two and a half hours. Plainview's coldness towards his helpless, damaged child is one of the most affecting and disturbing things I've ever seen in a film.
There were many ways to end the film. The one chosen by Anderson was perhaps the weakest. Throughout the lead up to the film, its obvious that the craftsman of the film is a genius. Why he chose to end such a magnificent film this way is a mystery to me. However, I think comparisons to Citizen Kane and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre are valid, because this is a film that will be remembered for a long time.