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Every once in a while, a movie comes along with its audacity to take
on grand themes, vast landscape, with out-sized characters that they
somehow trip. With "There Will be Blood", American director
Paul Thomas Anderson and star Daniel Day Lewis deliver grandly to make
it one of the best films of the year.
So it's no surprise that Anderson, Lewis and the movie itself have
all received Oscar nominations.
The one category in which the movie is most likely to bag an Oscar
is the Best Actor. Lewis delivers what could possibly be one of the
best performances of the decade.
It's a thrill to see Lewis tower in the vast landscape ably supported
by fine performances by the likes of Paul Dano and a weirdly beautiful
score by the rock group Radiohead's guitarist Johnny Greenwood.
On one level, the movie has two characters who are opposite on the
surface but deep down are mirror images of greed, ambition and eventually
murderous intentions.
The movie opens with some of the most powerful images underscored by
profound music with not a word uttered for almost 20 minutes. It is
1898 and Daniel Plainview (Lewis) is digging for silver in a mine, which
he accidentally discovers. And it becomes his life's obsession.
While drilling for oil, his partner dies and Plainview takes his son
as his own. This works out well for him because the young boy gives
him a look of a responsible family man when he travels to settle business
deals.
The action begins when a farm boy tells him they might have oil on
their farm. But when Plainview gets there, he begins to butt heads with
the boy's brother Eli (Paul Dano).
Eli is an ambitious preacher who wants to build a church with the money
earned from oil. The rest of the movie chronicles the battle between
these two driven, ambitious and manipulative men.
This is Anderson's fifth movie and is quite a detour from "Boogie
Nights" and "Magnolia". Anderson is slowly becoming one
of the best young directors around. Though this is the first movie he
has directed and has not written, it was his idea to base the movie
on a 1927 Upton Sinclair novel called "Oil!"
The movie has some very clear references to earlier classics like "Giant"
in 1956. Tackling themes like greed and ambition, we also get to see
capitalism in action in all its glory and shame.
Following Plainview's life, we get a prescient glimpse of the beginning
of the oil industry. Progress in society is often heralded, but too
often is built on the backs of those who sometimes had to pay in blood.
Another great building block of American society is religion. Dano
delivers an incredible performance as the pastor who uses his religion
to mask ugly ambitions. As the movie unfolds, we see how a young America's
drive to succeed and its ambiguous religious fervour at times make for
uneasy bedfellows.
Though the story is linear, it does at times try our patience because
of its pace. But for true epic filmmaking with towering performances,
there will be no better film than 'There Will be Blood" this year.
