Review of There Will Be Blood (2007) by Kieran B — 05 Feb 2013

'My name is Daniel Plainview and this is my son DW'.

An outstanding performance from Daniel Day Lewis in this historic backdrop of the discovery of Oil in the frontier of America. What I love about DD lewis is that although he takes long breaks from films, I admire he chose carefully, if you look at films like Gangs Of New York and his recent film Lincoln, there is a pattern emerging which to me it seems he is trying to archive a piece of history onto film, which is America's history.

Daniel Plainview is a gold digger who stumbles across oil and realises the mass of oil in the west, An accident occurs in one of the wells and becomes a baby's adopted father. The film jumps a number of years to when Plainview finds a perfect piece of land where 'oil is seeping out of the ground'. The character development from Day Lewis is astonishing, Plainview is a man who is selfish,manipulative, jealous and violent, yet within the film he acknowledges his own traits. When his alter ego a religious man Eli is easily manipulated and violated by Plainview, the chemistry on screen is sometimes cringy to see as Eli is so binded to his religion at times I sympathise with Plainview.

The film is a roller coaster ride people around him change and so does america, but Plainview is so concrete in his ideas and beliefs that he looses them closest to him. An excellent directed film from Paul T Anderson and a homage to the independent who managed to achieve one of the greatest films of the 21st century, a must see film for historic and psychological life lessons.