There Will Be Blood

Daniel Day-Lewis' IMDb page lists only eight film credits for him over the past fifteen years. In the last ten years he's only been in three movies. This is pretty unfortunate as in two of his last three films, this and Gangs of New York, he's proved himself as one of the greatest film actors of all time. His roles pop up every few years like the avatars of some Hindu god, enriching our lives with their brilliance and clarity. This time around he plays Daniel Plainview, a man who has dragged himself up by his own bootstraps to the top of the oil business in early twentieth century California. We follow him from the wordless twenty minute opening, as he mines for silver, through his early prospecting to his striking it big in Little Boston.

Plainview is, to put it lightly, pretty obnoxious. A twofaced man of almost pure greed, it's solely due to the power of Day-Lewis' performance that we even have any doubt over the fact that he is a creature of stunning devilry. The key to Plainview is that we never know really what sort of man he is, altogether sociopathic or containing a touch of compassion and humility; as we head through his life, Plainview casts off whomsoever seeks to disagree with him in any way. Friends and associates are cast aside, drop out of the script entirely, people are murdered and crushed by bits of oil derrick. We never know for sure whether he cares.

Central to these contradictions are two characters, both of them decidedly creepy in their own way. Plainview's adoptive son, HW, who he takes with him everywhere, and the firebrand preacher at Little Boston's Church of the Third Revelation, Eli Sunday. HW is a quiet boy, completely in awe of his father, this chameleon of a man who may or may not love him. Daniel seems at turns fiercely protective and callously dismissive of the boy, right up until the end scenes. Sunday, the film's main antagonist, is an intelligent representation of totalitarian faith, a man as consumed by God as Plainview is by greed. The two men clash in a struggle of wit and will, as one stroke leads to another, each becoming further and further from his own ideals.

In the end, both are consumed by their own vices and in the film's jarring final scene there is, as can be expected, blood. The film as a whole is curiously disjointed, as said above characters come and go, but taken as a character study of two men of wholly different faiths it's peerless film-making. Day-Lewis projects Plainview with such force that it holds all the segments of his life together, stops them looking like little parcels of edited film.

As the tale of one man's horrific life, There Will Be Blood can't be topped. But it is this disjointedness that leaves a slight tang in the mouth after such a feast of acting and cinematography. This tang though is ever so slight and far be it from me to pour scorn on what is a monumental piece of work for all concerned. 2008 has begun pretty strongly for movies, much better than the pretty dire '07, and this only adds another card to the opening gambit. 9/10 Two high ratings in my first two reviews? Oh well, Rambo next week.