There Will be Blood

Paul Thomas Anderson's new film There Will be Blood is a chilling, relentless portrait of one man's incomparable brutality. The iconic entrepreneur, Daniel Plainview has the knowledge, the means, and the implacable constitution necessary to serendipitously succeed in the hard-boiled oil business. Brilliantly acted by Daniel Day-Lewis (who demonstrates that he's in the same league as Gary Oldman when it comes to consistently mining new depths of character), Plainview will stop at nothing to achieve his ends, will never back down from a confrontation, and will never even slightly consider the interests of anyone but himself. The insatiable maniac, Plainview's portrait is dark and sinister, malicious and diabolical, mostly because he succeeds, he wins. At first, I thought Anderson was spending to much time highlighting details that could have been easily left out with no effect on the plot's development (a lot of time is spent in the beginning of the film lensing Plainview's first strike [reminded me of the wedding at the beginning of The Deer Hunter]), but as the film gushes forth, every bit of the manifested minutia builds Plainview's bastard of a character, meticulously managing the menace, sleekly saluting the irascibility.

There Will be Blood insightfully examines one man's unilateral determination, cunningly illustrating the alluring qualities of the wicked. Robert Elswit's beautiful cinematography oddly accentuates Plainview's macabre character, ironically challenging the cultural image of the genial capitalist, perceived as the good, remembered, as the remarkable.