There Will Be Blood, Paul Thomas Anderson’s epic American
nightmare, arrives belching fire and brimstone and damnation
to Hell. Set against the backdrop of the Southern California oil
boom of the late-19th and early-20th centuries, it tells a story of
greed and envy of biblical proportions — reverberating with Old
Testament sound and fury and New Testament evangelicalism —
which Mr. Anderson has mined from Upton Sinclair’s 1927 novel Oil!
There is no God but money in this oil-rich desert and his messenger
is Daniel Plainview, a petroleum speculator played by a monstrous
and shattering Daniel Day-Lewis.
Plainview is an American primitive. He’s more articulate and
civilized than the crude, brutal title character in Frank Norris’s
1899 novel McTeague, and Erich von Stroheim’s masterly version
of the same, Greed. And the film’s opener is a stunner — spooky
and strange, blanketed in shadows and nearly wordless. Inside
a deep, dark hole, a man pickaxes the hard-packed soil like
a bug gnawing through dirt. This is the earth mover, the ground
shaker: Plainview.
Over the next two and a half mesmerising hours Plainview will
strike oil, then strike it rich and transform a bootstrapper’s dream
into a terrifying prophecy about the coming American century.
It’s a century he plunges into slicked in oil, dabbed with blood
and accompanied by H. W. (eventually played by the newcomer
Dillon Freasier), the child who enters his life in 1902 after he makes
his first strike and seems to have burbled from the ground like
the liquid itself.
With a story of and for our times, There Will Be Blood can
certainly be viewed through the smeary window that looks onto
the larger world. It’s timeless and topical, general and specific,
abstract and as plain as the name of its fiery oilman. It’s an origin
story of sorts. But the film is above all a consummate work of
art, one that transcends the historically fraught context of its
making, and its pleasures are unapologetically aesthetic. It reveals,
excites, disturbs, provokes, but the window it opens is to human
consciousness itself.
Manohla Dargis,
The New York Times
The festival is delighted Daniel Day-Lewis and Paul Thomas
Anderson will attend the screening. A post screening discussion
will be hosted by Todd McCarthy, Chief Film Critic, Variety.
‘There Will be Blood’ Gala presentation is supporting the
charity Heart Children Ireland, the support group for parents
of children with a Congenital Heart Disorder.
