New Moon is nothing if not an international advertisement for the hungry virtues of virginity and young people can’t get enough of it
The Twilight Saga: New Moon
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A smart, prickly and rewarding view of sexual and emotional confusion
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Kitchen W8
Too long and drawn out but very entertaining with excellent special effects
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London,
Derek Malcolm's rating
Reader rating
Dir: Paul Thomas Anderson.
Cast: Daniel Day-Lewis, Paul Dano, Kevin J O'Connor, Dillon Freasier
Description: At the turn of the 20th century, Daniel Plainview has made a small fortune by drilling for oil: buying vast plots of land and draining them dry of black gold. A tip-off leads Daniel and his 10-year-old son H.W. to a rural community in the thrall of charismatic preacher Eli Sunday. Daniel establishes one of his rigs and taps into a huge underground reserve of oil, which he hopes to sell via an ambitious pipeline across the state. However, the tug of war between business and the church threatens the entire enterprise, pitting Daniel against an increasingly evangelical Eli in a battle for the residents' hearts and minds.
Country: US. 2007. 158mins
How the West was won: Daniel Day-Lewis (centre) plays the oil prospector Daniel Plainview as a turn-of-the-century Citizen Kane
Lily-livered: Paul Dano as the preacher
Scene setting: The film has no words for the first 20 minutes
The only person who could trump Martin Scorsese or Terrence Malick as America's best film-maker is surely Paul Thomas Anderson. His films have flaws and often a grandiose vision that almost up-ends them, but they are powerful and imaginative enough to leave an indelible imprint on the memory.
There Will Be Blood equals his earlier Magnolia in length, breadth and scope, and contains a performance from Daniel Day-Lewis that ought to be a shoo-in for an Oscar.
He plays Daniel Plainview, a self-willed, lone-wolf oil prospector in California in the final years of the 19th century who gains untold riches and loses his soul, if he ever had one.
In the process, he defeats the lily-livered preacher (Paul Dano) who, in return for allowing him to mine an unexplored oil field in his territory, forces him to confess his sins.
The film is based on the first few chapters of Upton Sinclair's 1927 novel Oil! but has parallels with Margaret Leslie Davis's impressive biography of Edward Doheny, California's first oil magnate.
Whereas Sinclair begins with the oil boom and progresses through the First World War and the Russian Revolution towards the development of the dream factory that is Hollywood, Anderson shapes his film round the gaunt and limping Plainview, a man who admits to liking nobody, perhaps not even himself.
If he has any affection, it is for the son he neglects (Dillon Freasier) who has been deafened in an oil rig accident. Otherwise, he uses the preacher as a pawn in the grim game of prising riches from the earth, suspects his long-lost half brother (Kevin O'Connor) is a fraud, sneers at those corporation men who want to buy him out and finally, exhausted by his efforts and the intimations of the man he has become, drinks himself into a stupor. He is almost a Charles Foster Kane of his time.
Day-Lewis does not overplay the strong hand he has been given, though some will think the final sequences carry him over into the territory of melodrama.
But he consistently adds to the power of the film by making Plainview not a villain but the kernel of a critical allegory about America, despite the fact that the doleful oilman often poses as a politely jovial and wealth-bringing businessman.
As a portrait of a twisted pioneer, this matches Warren Beatty in Robert Altman's McCabe and Mrs Miller. In fact, it is even more forcefully expressed.
Although Plainview is constantly at the centre of the film, the parched, oil-laden terrain is its other leading character. There Will Be Blood has no words for its first 20 minutes but simply shows the grinding process of excavation, the desert settlements, the deadly danger of the work and the final triumph of Plainview's odyssey when the black stuff pours high into the sky.
Anderson, with the help of his leading actor (winner of the Evening Standard's Best Actor Award for the role) and the pounding, screeching, humming music of Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood (Best Film Score), orchestrates all this with film-making that is artfully simple.
The film runs for more than two-and-a-half hours but for once feels less than its length because its tale covers so much ground within the wounded and wounding psyche of its central character. We don't know where he comes from, but we understand all too well where he ends up.
There Will Be Blood is sometimes as eccentric as Magnolia but always more direct in its expression. There are no frogs falling from the skies.
It could be claimed that Anderson's baleful vision of the nature of America's wealth, with its engine of greed and corruption, is hardly original. And should we have had more of Upton Sinclair's panoramic vision of the times and less of Plainview? That is at least arguable.
What is not worth cavilling at is the epic nature of the film-making, matched by the extraordinary intensity of Day-Lewis's performance.
Who knows if Anderson is capable of making the perfect film? We do know that he is unlikely ever to make one that lacks cinematic skill, imagination and a conviction which marks him out as a very special talent.
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Best film of the century (thus far). This is the gnarled heart of the American Dream.
- Robert A. Wright, Atlanta, Georgia, USA
Day-Lewis is a very convincing actor I'm sure, as he always is. But I have little patience for a two and a half hour indictment of the "greed" of America.
- Jennifer, USA
Afternoon:
15°c
