This breathtaking masterpiece from director Paul Thomas Anderson is one of the best American films in decades. Uniquely innovative from start to finish - both in Anderson's excellent script and his unorthodox direction - it also contains a career-best performance from the finest actor of his generation.
Daniel Day Lewis has had a career notable for its consistent level of excellence, no doubt due in part to his highly selective choice of roles. Here, he portrays an entrepreneur and self-proclaimed "oil-man" on his rise to wealth and power in the first decades of the twentieth century. On screen for virtually the entirety of the near-three hours of There Will Be Blood, his complete, full-blooded, human and ultimately demonic portrayal of a man's spiralling collapse within his own soul deservedly won him a second Best Actor gong at this year's Oscars.
The rest of the cast is also excellent, especially the young Paul Dano (best known as the one who doesn't speak in Little Miss Sunshine) who excels in a difficult role as a proto-evangelist preacher. Religion is a core aspect of the areas examined by the film, but Anderson does not presume to pass comment for or against it. Instead, religion and the economics of oil exploration are fused into a complex exploration of a number of issues underlying the surface fabric of the film.
Many reviews have praised the depiction of the period setting, but it isn't hard to see through this to a modern America, being chewed up by oil and religion. Both are seen as blood, coursing respectively through earth and society, a blood which boils up in the veins and arteries of the central character and is unleashed as cholic hatred on all within range.
The power and brilliance of There Will Be Blood is almost overwhelming on a first viewing - due in no small part to Johnny Greenwood's astonishing experimental score - and the film demands a second viewing. Watching it is like having your guts pulled out through your stomach, and yet somehow you leave the cinema walking on air. Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant.
5/5
