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There Will Be Blood

Review By: Michael Dance
MichaelDance@TheCinemaSource.com

There Will Be Blood is a one-of-a-kind movie, on one level a Citizen Kane-esque story about a miserable man corrupted by ambition, on another level a clash of business versus faith, and on quite another level, a horror movie. At the center of it all is another remarkably performance by Daniel Day-Lewis, soft-spoken in real life, who, like in Gangs of New York, speaks here with a rich bass that seems to set him on a higher plane from everyone else in the movie.

Day-Lewis plays Daniel Plainview, a self-made oil tycoon who travels with his young son H.W. (Dillon Freasier) and right-hand man Fletcher Hamilton (Ciaran Hinds). He gets a mysterious tip one day from a young man named Paul Sunday (Paul Dano) that there’s a town out west called Little Boston where the oil is so plentiful it’s literally oozing out of the ground.

His interest piqued, Plainview travels there, and what Paul said was true. But while Plainview calls in his work troops in and transforms Little Boston into a veritable oil colony, he has to deal with the town’s denizens, led by Eli Sunday – Paul’s twin brother, also played by Dano – the fire-and-brimstone preacher of the town church.

(If you miss exactly one line of dialogue, you might be as helplessly confused about the Paul/Eli relationship as much as I was – for a good three-fourths of the movie I was convinced that they were the same person, because Paul completely disappears from the story after his one early scene. Then again, I talked to a few people at my screening who didn’t seem to have a problem.)

At its heart, There Will Be Blood is the story of petty, hateful men whose chief delight is to humiliate one another. This sort of character study might turn off some, and I can see their point; by the end of the film it’s hard to feel much except sad disgust for both Daniel Plainview and Eli Sunday. But the extraordinary performances by Day-Lewis and Dano make up for that.

Day-Lewis’s performance will be compared to his much-heralded role in Gangs of New York, although with a twist since he’s technically playing the protagonist here. The real find is Dano, who fully announces himself as one of the best young actors out there after his near-mute role in last year’s Little Miss Sunshine. His Eli is charismatic, self-righteous, cruel, and not as smart as he thinks he is, but at the same time he’s wholly unlike any