There Will Be Blood: DVD Review (2008)

The best movie of Daniel Day-Lewis' career turns out to be in the best movie of Paul Thomas Anderson's career, a nice slice of symmetry that gets even better when you consider that so far, the actor and director have achieved their personal peaks in one of 2007's best films.

Thick with mustache and armed with enough greed and hate to ruin a country, nevermind a town, Day-Lewis’ Daniel Plainview comes to the oil-rich town of Little Boston with his son H.W. (Dillon Freasier) at his side.

He’s there to beat Standard Oil at their own game and buy up as much land as he can.

Meanwhile, he finds in Little Boston an unexpected adversary in Eli Sunday (Paul Dano), a Bible-thumping evangelist who sees in the good book what Plainview sees in oil--absolute power over the people.

Together, these two are pitted against each other in ways that make for stirring, dangerous entertainment, with each actor railing off the other and giving terrific performances in the process.

This is especially true for Day-Lewis, whose unshakable performance won him the Academy Award for Best Actor. His Plainview can be devastatingly cruel and kind in one brushstroke. We watch him with a sense of trepidation and fascination.

In this way, he literally is the face of the emerging West. In all the dirt and suffering that surround Plainview, a groundswell of promise nevertheless bubbles beneath his feet. Blood will be spilled to realize that promise--an element that gives the film its sharp connection to the present--but in this do-or-die culture of creating a secure new culture, the pull of that promise is enough to tip those who seek it into madness.

Just as it is now.

Read the full, unedited review here.

Rated R. Grade: A

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