26th February, 2008

DAVID ADAMS

There Will Be Blood (M)

In A Word: Bitter

AN 'OIL MAN'? : Daniel Day-Lewis won an Academy Award for Best Actor for his portrayal of Daniel Plainview. "Don’t expect to be uplifted by this film. A study of what overbearing hatred and greed can do to a man, it’s a tough film to watch and leaves one with a sour aftertaste."

There is no doubt Daniel Day-Lewis is a great actor and his role the oil epic There Will Be Blood confirms it (he was duly awarded the Academy Award for Best Actor on Monday). But for all the great acting in it, There Will Be Blood is a hard film to swallow; a relentless movie about one man’s drive for wealth in America’s early oil years and the high price he pays to get it which leaves a bitter aftertaste in the mouth.

Spanning a period from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries, the Paul Thomas Anderson directed film, which is based on the Upton Sinclair’s novel Oil!, follows the rise of Daniel Plainview (Day-Lewis) as he moves from being a small-time silver prospector seeking his fortune to big time oil tycoon anxious to hold on to all he’s got yet who is, at the end, left with nothing but his wealth.

Plainview’s big break comes when, tipped off about a big oil find, he - and his adopted son, HW (played largely by Dillon Freasier) - travel to the small town of Little Boston in California and there finds oil beyond Plainview’s wildest dreams. But he also finds a community with whom he must work and quickly comes to loggerheads with local boy-turned self-styled preacher and healer Eli Sunday (played by Paul Dano) with whom he forms an increasingly acrimonious relationship.

There is nothing, it seems Plainview won’t do to ensure his success and the movie follows his rise to power and wealth and his gradual descent into insanity a la Howard Hughes in The Aviator.

There Will Be Blood is visually impressive and features an in-your-face, intense and, at times, screeching, soundtrack, manages to put you on the edge of your seat for much of the movie and has you often waiting flinchingly for violence that never arrives.

Don’t expect to be uplifted by this film. A study of what overbearing hatred and greed can do to a man, it’s a tough film to watch and leaves one with a sour aftertaste.

~ www.therewillbeblood.com

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