There most certainly Will Be Blood
Poster from Paramountvintage.com
Having missed out on catching There Will Be Blood at the cinema earlier this year, I was looking forward to it being released on DVD. I found it had already been moved to three night new release by the time I got around to visiting the video shop; I grabbed it, drove home and watched it.
It is not difficult to see why Daniel Day-Lewis (In the Name of the Father, Gangs of New York) won the Best Actor Academy Award. His performance as Daniel Plainview was startling. The film, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson (Boogie Nights, Punch Drunk Love) was very well received by many critics when it first hit the cinemas.
There Will Be Blood was inspired by the book Oil! by Upton Sinclair and is set during the 1890s to early 1900s America. Plainview is an oil prospector who is tipped off that an earthquake in Little Boston, California has revealed the area is rich in oil. Plainview and his adopted son H.W. (Dillon Freasier) travel to the area, find that there are plentiful amounts of the liquid, start buying up leases and bring in the workers to start drilling to extract the oil. Plainview uses H.W. to get sympathy from the townspeople to ensure he can go about his business without too much resistance, giving a long speech stating that he is a “family man” in a family business. After a series of events, Plainview’s true nature is revealed.
Paul Dano (Little Miss Sunshine) is also wonderful as Eli Sunday, a priest at the Church of the Third Revelation who claims he can remove demons and sin from souls. Sunday’s role is important, but I won’t give the story away. Incidentally, the person who informed Plainview that there is oil in Little Boston is also played by Dano, playing Eli Sunday’s twin brother.
The original music in the film was composed by Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood. Music and sound effects are integral to the films mood, and sets the scene for the dry, dusty, bleak landscape of this area of America that made people rich. The DVD extra presents a short collection of photographs and silent films from the era and compares them to scenes from the film. And that is one of the most interesting aspects of the film; it’s obvious that the film makers tried to be as authentic as possible down to the smallest detail.
I wasn’t a particularly big fan of Anderson’s other films, but There Will Be Blood will most certainly be a classic.
