Daniel Day Lewis delivers a powerhouse performance in this Academy Award-winning tale of greed and oil in turn of the century California. Lewis is Daniel Plainview, a down-and-out silver miner who transforms himself into a rich oil tycoon. When he learns of a small oil-rich town in California, he moves there with his adopted son, HW. Using his son to project the image of a caring family man, Plainview gains the co-operation of almost all the locals in the town, with promises to build schools and cultivate the land to make their community flourish. However, over time, Plainview's gradual accumulation of wealth and power causes his true self to surface, and he begins to slowly alienate himself from everyone in his life - including his own son.
On first viewing, one could argue that Daniel Day-Lewis’s performance as oilman Daniel Plainview in There Will Be Blood overwhelms the film, just as
Plainview’s bu... more >
On first viewing, one could argue that Daniel Day-Lewis’s performance as oilman Daniel Plainview in There Will Be Blood overwhelms the film, just as
Plainview’s burning oil wells engulf their primitive wooden frames
We meet him, in an extended, wordless opening sequence, as a tenacious California silver miner at the end of the 19th Century. Submerged in a dangerous quarry, he is restlessly pursuing his buried treasure. Later, after striking petroleum, he becomes an oil prospector, and by 1911, he is travelling the state, persuading various townsfolk to allow him to drill their land. On the way he has adopted a young orphan of the mines, H.W., and perfected a mellifluous drawl that transcends hucksterism and captivates audiences of would-be colluders in his ‘humble’ plans for a future built on oil.
But as the film turns from a painstaking evocation of the spirit of the early American capitalists to a brutal treatise on greed, religion and man’s inhumanity to man, Plainview becomes an out-and-out monster, as volatile and volcanic as the lucrative black geysers he devotes his life to striking. Having bought oil-rich land from the impoverished Sunday family in a barren corner of California, he sees his empire boom while his personal life descends into betrayal, paranoia and alcoholism. An ideological clash with the Sundays’ fire-and-brimstone minister son Eli escalates into an all-consuming enmity; an explosion that deafens H.W. sees him abandoning his son; and the return of a long-lost brother further derails his sense of familial responsibility. More than anything, however, it is his relentless hunger for power that turns Plainview into one the most outrageous misanthropes of modern cinema.
Day-Lewis admittedly lets fly to a caricature of a human being here. But a film of fearless extremes requires a performance of equal courage and audacity. Indeed, it is because of this, and its fusion of the frankly absurd and the epically beautiful, that There Will Be Blood achieves the prickly quality of a true masterpiece. < less
