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THERE WILL BE BLOOD

By Editor-in-Chief ⋅ February 25, 2008 ⋅  Print this post ⋅ Post a comment

DAY-LEWIS IMPRESSES AS TURN-OF-THE-CENTURY PROSPECTOR

Jack Watson

If there is one film this year that is worth viewing for the lead performance alone, ‘There Will Be Blood’ is it. Daniel Day-Lewis is fantastic as Daniel Plainview, a role which will surely be career defining. Harking back to the likes of Orson Welles’ ‘Citizen Kane’ the story is fairly simple, focusing upon the spiralling descent of one man’s dreams for success into madness and greed.

Set in late 19th and early 20th century America the film, certainly in the first half at least, has very much the feel of a western, as our anti-hero goes in search of the undiscovered oilfields lying beneath the incendiary Californian frontier. Unlike ‘Citizen Kane’ however, Plainview remains a mystery to the last as we are denied any revelatory information at the end, and indeed throughout the film, are given very little to go on regarding his past. It is almost as if Plainview has risen, monster like, out of the black gloop itself, so much does the stuff seem to course through his veins. As a testament to the greatness of Day-Lewis as an actor, he manages to frighteningly convey the warped hate and malevolence of a man so obsessively wrapped up in the race for oil dominance merely by a glance, a look. While we can’t accurately guess what is going on behind those steel-blue eyes, we know it is something no doubt truly sinister.