| There Will Be Blood - 9/10 or ****1/2/***** stars In his first film in five years, Paul Thomas Anderson has shown how incredibly far he's come as a director since his 1996 debut, Hard Eight, with There Will Be Blood, a mesmerizing and wholly original epic that won't be forgotten anytime soon. Anderson's script and direction is outstanding, but without a proper leading actor to bring the material to life, who knows if There Will Be Blood would've been as fantastic. Anderson selected the best actor to carry the film, and that actor is none other than Daniel Day-Lewis, whose performance as Daniel Plainview, a loathsome, deceitful, ruthless oil prospector, is more of a transformation than an actual performance. He submerges himself into this role, and for almost three hours, you see only Plainview, not Day-Lewis. If the A.F.I. ever decide to form a "100 Years... 100 Performances" list in the near future, Day-Lewis deserves a spot -- that's how brilliant his performance is. Although Day-Lewis is receiving tons of praise (and deservedly so), his co-star, Paul Dano, who was last seen in Little Miss Sunshine, deserves praise as well, especially for managing to hold his own against a vastly superior, more experienced actor. Anderson disallows There Will Be Blood to stick to one theme since it covers many themes, such as the consequences of greed, the lust for power, the relationships between fathers and their sons, using God and religion for selfish reasons, etc. There Will Be Blood will certainly divide audiences, but no matter if you love it or hate it, this is a different breed of cinema. Strider |