15, 158min
From the first 15 minutes of There Will Be Blood, which occur without dialogue but in a state of complete dramatic tension, you realise that you are in for a unique, startling and, well, slightly strange experience.
The film details the relentless rise of Daniel Plainview (Day-Lewis, above with Freasier), a turn-of- the-century oil man driven by a combination of greed and misanthropy. Plainview underpays ranch owners for their oil-rich land, he freely uses his adopted son (Freasier) to engender sympathy for his voracious practices, and plans to make enough money to isolate himself from humankind for ever. His only external impediment is a sly young preacher called Eli Sunday (Dano), who envies Plainview’s increasing wealth and hopes to siphon some of it away for his own evangelical ambitions.
Thus the film is at its best when it plays as a gripping tussle, or a mutually destructive dance, between Plainview and Sunday. Here Plainview embarrasses Sunday in front of the locals, there Sunday humiliates Plainview by forcing him to be baptised, and here Plainview beats Sunday to a pulp, and so on.
Advertisement
In this Dano and Day-Lewis crackle dangerously together on screen - the forced baptism scene, in particular, shows two men torn between their own consuming hatreds and their need for redemption. However, whenever Sunday leaves the story, the film dips somewhat and becomes, instead, a portrait of Plainview, as created by Day-Lewis. In this we get to marvel at the enormity of the performance.
We can then conclude that if Day-Lewis is not the greatest screen actor of his generation, he is certainly the most committed.