There Will Be Blood

While There Will Be Blood clearly marks a tremendous departure for filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson, the movie is often as compelling and flat-out exhilarating as anything within the director’s virtually flawless body of work. Based in part on a novel by Upton Sinclair, the film follows turn-of-the-century oil man Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) as he battles both the harsh terrain of the landscape and an antagonistic preacher (Paul Dano’s Eli Sunday) to slowly-but-surely build up his business. Saddled with a thoroughly deliberate pace and a central character that’s far from likeable, There Will Be Blood is surely the least accessible of Anderson’s films – yet there’s little doubt that Day-Lewis’ commanding, downright captivating performance carries the proceedings through the entirety of its 158-minute running time. And while it eventually does become clear that Anderson intends for the film to come off as a low-key character study (albeit one set within the context of an epic framework), the inclusion of a seemingly out-of-left-field finale does force the viewer to re-evaluate the importance of everything that’s come before it (ie the movie is, once everything’s said and done, not quite about what one initially suspected). That being said, Anderson, along with cinematographer Robert Elswit and musician Jonny Greenwood, has infused There Will Be Blood with precisely the sort of immersive feel that one has come to expect from the filmmaker – with the end result an indelible, sporadically enthralling piece of work.

**** out of ****