Our Review By Julia
It's a heck of a long way from the 1980s porn industry to the oil fields of early twentieth century America, but director Paul Thomas Anderson (of "Boogie Nights" fame) has done a magnificent job writing and directing "There Will be Blood". Only die-hard fans of Upton Sinclair, upon whose novel "Oil!" the screenplay is very loosely based, will find much to cavil at, and the film will no doubt garner a clutch of Oscars.
The story begins in 1898, when Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) is lucky to survive a fall into his own ramshackle silver mine and even luckier when he discovers oil. Plainview adopts "H.W", the baby son of a dead fellow miner - more out of the child's usefulness as a sympathy-winning prop than genuine affection, although Plainview's concern when the boy is deafened in an accident is his only likeable trait - and embarks on an increasingly obsessive quest for more oil, trampling over anyone who stands in his way. His first victims are the impoverished and naieve Sunday family beneath whose semi-desert ranch at Little Boston lies vast untapped reserves of black gold.
Eli Sunday (Paulo Dano), the twin brother of the man who tipped Plainview off about the presence of oil on his family's goat farm, is a charismatic young preacher and faith healer at the Church of the Third Revelation. The tension between these two men, each of whom attempts to exploit the other for his own gain, lies at the heart of this bleak but rewarding film and gives rise to some
violent and blackly comedic scenes.
Daniel Day-Lewis surely has no serious rivals for the Best Actor Oscar this year - all credit to Martin Scorsese for coaxing him out of retirement for "Gangs of New York"! He gives a totally believable portrayal of Plainview's gradual transformation from a struggling miner to smooth-talking businessman, ruthless tycoon and - by 1937 - half-crazed alcoholic recluse.
Although Plainview dominates the film there are excellent supporting performances by Paul Dano as the smarmy evangelist Eli Sunday, Dillon Freasier as young "F.W." and Kevin J. O'Connor as a loser claiming to be Plainview's long-lost half-brother Henry.
The visuals are stunning, particularly the explosive eruption of oil and subsequent spectacular fire when the Little Boston well is tapped, and the landscape is so tangibly dessicated I found myself swigging orange juice throughout the film...
Jonny Greenwood's music (yes, Jonny Greenwood of "Radiohead") also makes a valuable contribution to the film's atmosphere, particularly in the many scenes in which dialogue is pared down to the minimum.
It may only be February but I predict that it will take a truly outstanding release to threaten "There Will Be Blood" as the best film of 2008.
Movie Details
An epic tale of family, faith, power and oil set on the incendiary frontier of California's turn-of-the-century petroleum boom. The story chronicles the life and times of one Daniel Plainview, who transforms himself from a down-and-out silver miner raising a son on his own into a self-made oil tycoon. When Plainview gets a mysterious tip-off that there's a little town out West where an ocean of oil is oozing out of the ground, he heads with his son, H.W., to take their chances in dust-worn Little Boston.
In this hardscrabble town, where the main excitement centers around the holy roller church of charismatic preacher Eli Sunday, Plainview and H.W. make their lucky strike. But even as the well raises all of their fortunes, nothing will remain the same as conflicts escalate and every human value love, hope, community, belief, ambition and even the bond between father and son is imperiled by corruption, deception and the flow of oil.
