Year of Release: 2007Country of Origin: USA
Director: Paul Thomas Anderson
Cast: Daniel Day-Lewis, Paul Dano, Dillon Freasier
Plot outline: A story about family, greed, religion, and oil, centered around a turn-of-the-century prospector in the early days of the business (IMDb).
There Will Be Blood strives to be an epic, a masterpiece of cinema, unfortunately it falls short of that goal thanks to its imperfections: in its unbending characters, its lack of women or any reflection of ordinary society, its ending, its relentlessness - I see its reach exceeding its grasp. There Will Be Blood could easily be called great, but it is no Citizen Kane. Daniel Plainview lacks a "Rosebud." He regrets nothing, misses nothing, pities nothing, I am not sure of its greatness. For two thirds it is a brilliantly played and structured take on ambition and capitalism. The final act turns the movie into a mano-a-mano showdown between two characters in which ambition is no longer the issue but rather one man’s god versus another man’s god. Daniel Day-Lewis is very powerful as Plainview, and while he maintains some of that power in the final act he resorts to a level of insanity that doesn’t fit with the rest of the movie or with the path his character was on. There Will Be Blood ends up a good, bordering on very good, movie that gets lost in its own desires to be a sweeping melodrama. (BME, RE)
My judgement: *** out of 4 stars
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