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There Will Be Blood
robinsonwhitmer - wrote on 04/25/08
This is Day-Lewis’ most raucous and comedic performance I have seen and I am not surprised at his winning of the best actor Oscar. He a self described “Oil Man” and he runs around making money off oil– a seemingly appropriate subject considering the current state of affairs in the world. Everyone vies for the most money they can get, and oil is a goldmine. In the movie it was a goldmine for Americans, and we are shown how one greedy and cold man capitalized on the oil rush in the industrial revolution. No doubt Sinclair wrote this story as a satire, and it was filmed in much the same way – a greedy man running around with no respect for others. Plainview the Oil Man.is clumsy, ignorant, manipulative and isolated; with no wife, or fiends to keep him honest, he takes his son on his mad search for oil and his son is injured to the point of losing his hearing in the process. Plainview is so caught up the pursuit for oil that he leaves the fathering of his son to others.
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this film is the way Plainview grapples with his relations with other people. He repeatedly insults and treats others with disdain – the townspeaople who contract him to mine their oil, the fellow businessmen whose generous proposals go rudely rejected, and most of all the young preacher who attempts to convert him with wild sermons. It could be argued that Plainview is a product of the evil greed he sees in others. When he is finally convinced by a religious landowner to “be saved” in one of the wild sermons as part of a business deal, the preacher humiliates him by slapping him and forcing to admit his wrongdoing with his son.
Throughout the rest of the film, the little humanity left in Plainview is diminished. He murders when he finds out a long lost brother had been dishonest with him. As his deaf tries to make amends, he cruelly disowns him with a verbal barrage of bitter insults. And the story ends with the aged preacher begging Plainview for money pre-depression. The shrewd businessman forces the preacher to admit that he is a false profit only to sarcastically nullify any hope of financial aide. The brutal cold calculation is taken a step too far and the businessman turns into a drunken raging beast that can barely walk chasing the cowering priest and finally bludgeoning him with a bowling pin. The worst part of it is that Plainview’s butler seems to be willing to clan up the mess. So a piece of American history that is laughable at times ends with a starkly violent and startling scene.
But Plainview's mustache redeems everything.
