Review: There Will Be Blood

As the camera presents the postcard-imagery of the Californian desert whilst discordant piano and strings blast out over the audience, it's clear this film is anything but introverted. And yet the entire narrative revolves around one man - oil prospector Daniel Plainview - and his inner struggles with bitterness, loss, anger and alcohol. This is an opera on the subject of psychology, an all-guns-blazing melodrama on the ramifications of greed.

We first glimpse Plainview mining for silver down a hand-picked mineshaft. As he claws at the rock for all he's worth, he seems a man possessed, and certainly the allegory that this is a fallen angel crawling back to hell is apt. Soon his attention turns to oil, and with it a tip (from the enigmatic 'Paul') of where he can find lakes of the stuff beneath a Californian ranch. He duly buys up the ranch, but comes into conflict with Eli, Paul's evangelical twin-brother, who takes a very different view of Plainview's intentions. As Plainview builds his rig, Eli builds his church on the opposing hill, the implication being that this is little more than willy-waving.

Both the Church and the oil prospectors are condemned in equal measure by director Paul Thomas Anderson. The message here is clear: the raping of America, both by money-men and churchmen, have caused irreparable damage. As revealed in the brilliant final scene, Plainview and Eli have far more in common than one might first imagine, and the assertion of both of them that money is the holy grail of human happiness is well wide of the mark.

As Plainview, Daniel Day-Lewis gives, as you'd expect, a powerhouse performance. What makes him so great is his unswerving commitment to the characters he plays. You know that when he winces, he is feeling genuine pain, and when he's dog-tired, he's dog-tired. There's something in his guttural roars that is truly 'from hell', yet his sinister charm works as well on the audience as it does on the ranch-owners he's looking to exploit. This is a lesson in film-making, evoking obvious comparisons with films such as Citizen Kane, Gone With The Wind, Chinatown and Giant. There is something Shakesperean about the narrative that makes it all the more compelling - a reminder that the roots of modern-day capitalism are as tragic as anything the bard could dream up. Indeed, for me, the title provides an eerie reminder that the century which followed this black gold-rush was the bloodiest in human history.

For my rant about the UK release date of this film, click here.