Movie Review: There Will Be Blood

9/10

It's not much fun. It is, however, brilliant.

I recall earlier this year sitting down to watch The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford with my inestimable younger brother and he summed it up very well as "not really a film, more some sort of freaky Movie voodoo!" A pithy description of what is likely to be considered in future one of the true classics of recent years.

The same, gladly, is true of There Will Be Blood, a frankly staggering work that gets over a real level of passion and commitment on the part of every single actor, crew member and writer involved. There is really no way for me to praise the experience enough, but as a summary I think that will do. You may wonder about the 9/10 given the effusive comments I will make below - I will explain this now. I wanted more. For every minute up on screen I felt there was tonnes of backstory, depth and expansion to be inferred and I would have liked a few of the blanks to be filled in, but its a minor problem really and may well attest more to the film's greatness that I still hungered for more after a good two and a half hours.

Beware of minor spoilers below.

It is, of course, Daniel Day Lewis' movie. It is absolutely impossible to see anybody else pull this off - he balances the obvious charisma such a man would have needed against the toughness and guile required to compete in one of the most cutthroat and profitable businesses of all time. Daniel Plainview is a user - of people, of image - a true capitalist in the purest sense. When he talks of improvements to the town and giving back to the community, Day-Lewis somehow simultaneously projects trustworthiness while at the same time there is no question he will let the town burn if it makes financial sense.

He even sees the bright side in an early pit death, adopting a son which then gives him the gravitas of "a family man", a phrase he uses consistently despite preferring to watch a fire burn all night instead of checking up on his injured boy.

But the films strengths lie mainly in its three dimensional main characters - while on the face of it both Plainview and his uneasy ally, Eli Sunday seem initially to be all too one dimensional - Plainview all about power through money, Sunday all about control through religion. To avoid this simplification we are given little moments of light in the darkness - Plainview stops one little girl from being beaten by her father and goes through with most of his promises to the townsfolk, but tellingly never pays Eli Sunday his fee.

The two protagonists are obsessed by one thing above all - winning. We are told explicitly in Plainview's case but things are less clear with Sunday initially, but he soon succumbs to point scoring and humiliation of his foe in an attempt to control the "hearts and minds" of his people. Against Plainviews sheer tunnel vision power he stands little chance and in one of modern cinema's great duologues (see Heat or Unforgiven for others) the final scene is a masterclass in brutal finality.

Given the high bar for cinematography set by superstar of the field Roger Deakins in films like Jesse James and No Country For Old Men it is great to see that Robert Elswit easily matches his contemporary in this film. Every shot is gorgeous, full of detail and beauty even in the darkest moments, and that hideous cliché "cinematic poetry" is about the only useful way to describe the means by which a man can make a oil derrick fire look like the most gorgeous thing on the planet.

I can't recommend this film highly enough, I believe everyone should see it if not own a copy of it to be brought out whenever an older relative says something about them "not making films as good as in my day". Guess what mate, they freaking well do. There Will Be Blood can go twelve rounds with almost any film you set it against. You won't come out the other side with a burgeoning love for your fellow man, and it's certainly not one for all the family, but neither wass recent Empire poll winner, The Godfather, with which it shares a certain tone of inevitable malaise.

It came agonisingly close to a perfect score, but I just wanted it to have another half hour of story - it's not film spoilingly deficient by any means, I just found the last temporal jump a little big for my taste and it took me out of the moment a bit because of the sheer weight of years past and mental filling in required.

See it. Enjoy it. You shouldn't be disappointed.

A