![]() ![]() He has also found a remarkable walk: a slow purposeful scuttle, bow-legged. Day-Lewis's virtuoso displays of technique, occasionally denounced as hamminess, are for me all the more superbly enjoyable for being so rare in an age of naturalism. When Day-Lewis gives his first speech, a quiet, faintly impatient peroration to a crowd of smallholders on why they should trust him as a real "oil man", it is mesmeric for no reason other than the actor's natural charismatic presence. It is a drawl, oddly patrician in its pedantic intonations and emphases, with a Scots-Irish-American sound, perhaps inspired by John Huston. ![]() This was the dirty work that created our leisured modern age.Ĭrafted and stylised, Day-Lewis's performance for me amounts to a sensual pleasure: like Olivier, he has apparently found the character by first hitting on externals, notably the voice, itself a startling invention. Plainview's underground toil is like this: barbaric, almost inhuman. I can only compare this wordless sequence to the "Dawn of Man" scene at the beginning of Kubrick's 2001, in which the apes discover that they can use their opposable thumbs to grip tools, and so bash the bone into the air, which becomes the spaceship. Jonny Greenwood's atonal orchestral score is cranked up to 11, like the rest of Anderson's film, and against its ominous clamour, you see the stark mountainous landscape where Plainview is working underground, fanatically, unceasingly, hacking away with his pickaxe. ![]() The opening scenes of There Will Be Blood are really extraordinary. And he has an enemy: a smooth and sanctimonious young preacher, Eli Sunday (Paul Dano), whose family ranch Plainview has had to buy to get at the oceans of oil underground. But Plainview has one vulnerability: he has an adopted son, named HW (Dillon Freasier), whom he loves and yet exploits. Shrewdly, ruthlessly, Plainview parlays that initial stroke of good luck into a gigantic fortune, driven by pride and misanthropic contempt for everyone and everything around him. Daniel Day-Lewis plays Daniel Plainview, a pioneer silver-miner who chances upon oil in 1898, a discovery he greets with a brief, leonine grin - one of the very few times he smiles. The movie speaks of oil's savage, entrepreneurial pre-history in one haunted man, it shows our dysfunctional relationship with capital and natural resources, and even hints at a grim future in which our addiction to oil can no longer be fed. I can only describe it as an epic portrait, running from the beginning of the 20th century to the great crash of 1929. With its lowering, psychotic atmosphere and its Bunyanesque surnames, There Will Be Blood is so potent and so strange that it almost seems to have been delivered here from another planet. ![]()
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