By Rishi Kabir - Entertainment Manager
There Will Be Blood may either be the most poignant character film since Citizen Kane or one of the most funniest films ever nominated for an Oscar. Funny you may ask? Why is it funny? Isn’t this the same film that garnered Daniel Day Lewis an Oscar for best actor and the prestigious Best Cinematography award? Isn’t this the film that creates the epic protagonist Daniel Plainview as being the oil equivalent of Charles Foster Kane?
Yes indeed this is the very same film. So to answer the query why is it funny? Perhaps its just me, but when watching this oil digging tycoon bully and maneuver his way against the likes of a hypocritical town preacher Eli, by beating him with a bowling pin, one can only stifle a laugh at the hilarity of the situation.
There Will be Blood is the movie that serves as a case study into the greed of Daniel Plainview, a shrewd oil-driller and businessman, with a penchant for profit and oil. After being alerted to a potential oil reserve near a quaint religious town whose preacher, Eli, demands a monetary endowment, Plainview takes advantage of the town’s naiveté and begins to extract the oil. This causes some tension with Eli as Plainview refuses to pay him his due. Thus sparks a bitter rivalry between the town preacher and the coveting oil man.
The film’s strong point lies in its use of cinematography, which is stoic from the beginning and is accompanied by an almost eerie musical score of rhythm and violins (reminiscent of the Psycho music but nowhere as clichéd as Psycho).
Throughout the film there is the palpable antagonism between Eli and Plainview, as both are allegorically opposed to each other. Plainview may be a shrewd and ruthless oil tycoon but his menace is quite open. Daniel Plainview hates the world and the people that live in it, but he also accepts them for what they are and never judges the evil he knows is reflected within himself as well. Plainview is a man of brutal honesty and a warped sense of integrity that will never compromised.
Eli is the opposite. Although a preacher of high esteem with the people, he is essentially a con artist who’s religious dexterity is but a façade to hide his own weakness for profit and esteem. Everything about Eli is a hypocritical lie, disguised under the guile of religion. Plainview senses that and is thus unequivocally against him.
These two foils represent much of the films underlying message, that evil is prevalent between two types, the overt and the disguised. This is a film that delivers after a second and third viewing. Go out and enjoy this film.
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