There Will Be Blood
There Will Be Blood adapted from the 1920’s novel “Oil” is true to the title but only after about two and a half hours have passed in this circa 1900 epic drama. Meantime for the first 20 minutes you start to believe that there won’t be any dialogue yet the basis of the story unfolds articulately thanks to the talent of Daniel Day Lewis. As we’ve come to expect, when he does finally speak he brings a fresh new character from his acting arsenal, in this case Daniel Plainview a California silver miner who instantly changes careers when his mineshaft started gushing black gold. As a moderately successful and abundantly resourceful oil man looking for new business he comes to a westerly town sitting on a lake of crude and proceeds to swindle the town in whatever unscrupulous ways that he can. There Will Be Blood also stars Paul Dano who barely said anything in Little Miss Sunshine’s but he spouts a litany of religious rhetoric as Eli Sunday, an evangelical preacher. As the years pass these two tangle in an ever escalating power struggle but the unstoppable Plainsview is so corrupted by the lure of petro-prosperity that nothing, not prayer, not conscience not even family can bring about his redemption.