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THERE WILL BE BLOOD Send This Review to a Friend
The most impressive aspect of “There Will be Blood,” an attempt at creating an epic by writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson, is the tremendous performance by Daniel Day-Lewis as a vicious, greed-motivated, egomaniacal oil baron of the early 20th century in California, where gushers come in and people are ruthlessly exploited. I cannot share the enthusiasm of many colleagues for the film bordering on greatness, for it is relentlessly one-note. Although it is based, albeit as they say “loosely,” on Upton Sinclair’s celebrated novel “Oil!,” it lacks the political scope for which Sinclair was known and therefore is primarily a study in spectacular cinematography and an un-shaded portrait of an S.O.B. with only the occasional redeeming feature if one searches hard enough. Therefore, for all of the technique and the engrossing story and dynamic star performance, the film doesn’t arrive with a gusher of depth.
Yes, it does capture the spirit of hunger for profit at the expense of others and the almost maniacal lust for power embodied in the mean-spirited life of the self-made tycoon Daniel Plainview (Day-Lewis). Without stretching the imagination, one can make the jump and compare such evil with corporate greed abounding today. Anderson packs the film with gritty scenes of early oil exploration and the human toll taken along the way as Plainview grows richer and richer and ever more powerful. And, count on the title, there will indeed be blood.
As for other key characters in the sprawling (two hours and 38 minutes) drama, one is Plainview’s son H.W. (Dillon Freasier), and another is played by Paul Dano as Eli, a hypocritical evangelist preacher who exploits the need of people to believe. Dano, who also plays the evangelist’s brother Paul, gives a showy performance as the preacher, but the character itself is merely sleazy and vacuous, without rising to the level of a portrait to be taken seriously as an expose of this type of religious exploitation.
The driving force of the film remains Day-Lewis’s extraordinary performance, one certainly to be seen and one which bids to compete for awards. It is his show. But the film itself, for all of its lack of depth beyond the obvious tale of hunger for wealth and power as a definition of the American dream, is also riveting visually and for its nastiness and violent atmosphere. Despite the film’s length, the time passes quickly. A Paramount Vantage and Miramax Films release.
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