Cultural Dessert

'There Will Be Blood'

29 February 2008

Paul Thomas Anderson's film 'There Will Be Blood' has received rave reviews - particularly for its tour-de-force performance by Daniel Day Lewis - with some daring to compare it with 'Citizen Kane'. It therefore had a lot to live up to when I went to see it yesterday and, while it didn't entirely succeed, it is a very impressive work. From the start it has the feel of an epic with wide open landscapes, long silences and a gritty visceral portrayal of the realities of digging for oil at the turn of the 19th/20th centuries. There is some great cinematography - you really need to see it on a big screen for those scenes where the camera fixes on a long view of the countryside in which something important is happening between two tiny figures in the bottom left hand corner. The plot is intriguingly unpredictable whilst, paradoxically, almost everything that happens seems to have been telegraphed by a casual comment much earlier in the film. And while we clearly spend much of the film rooting for Daniel Day Lewis's character, Daniel Plainview, - particularly in his battles with the extremely creepy preacher played by Paul Dano - we never really like him. Is he a monster? - or just an ordinary man trying to achieve his goals? Is he lonely? - or just manipulative? An impressive film that generates more questions than it answers - and probably needs to be seen several times.

Labels: Film

posted by Robin Simpson @ 9:19 am