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There Will Be Blood 15
SCREENINGS 8pm Friday 18 April 2008
Winner of Oscar for Best Actor & Best Cinematography
The story chronicles the life and times of one Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis), who transforms himself from a down-and-out silver miner raising a son on his own into a self-made oil tycoon.
When Plainview gets a mysterious tip-off that there's a town out West where an ocean of oil is oozing out of the ground, he heads with his son, H W (Dillon Freasier) to take their chances in dust-worn Little Boston... Day-Lewis has picked up numerous awards, including the Oscar, BAFTA and Golden Globe, for his masterful performance, the score by Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood has been widely praised, and Paul Thomas Anderson’s film is being lauded by the critics as something new and exciting, sometimes talked of as a modern Citizen Kane. Come and see what you think.
BBFC advice: Contains strong violence
“There Will Be Blood is emphatically not an easy watch. Before an image hits the screen, a mounting, atonal string note assaults the viewer’s ears, immediately inducing a feeling of unease - if not actual nausea. That’s followed by 20-odd minutes of dialogue-free action. Two and a half hours later, it finishes with a scene that seems tonally so at odds with everything that has gone before, jars so horribly, that you’re afraid it’s scuppered the entire thing - until you go home, think about it for a day or two, and realise that it’s perfect. It won’t come to you immediately, but this may be a masterpiece.
... A protagonist rather than a hero, Plainview is a man of impressive grit and untrammelled greed who pulls himself up by the bootstraps to turn from lone prospector to oil mogul. When we first see him, he’s sweaty, dirt-covered and hacking at a rock wall with a pickaxe at the bottom of a jerry-rigged mine. He risks life and limb for a few nuggets of silver, the tickets to his next move - oil. With a few hardy employees, yet more months in the desert, and a lethal mix of primitive machinery and scanty health-and-safety regulations, he strikes it lucky. But soon an industrial accident leaves Plainview holding a baby, whom he adopts as his son H. W. (Dillon Freasier), for reasons that are not initially clear.
...Uncompromising, intelligent and searing cinema. Along with The Assassination Of Jesse James... and No Country For Old Men, this is the best batch of Western-set dramas in decades. John Huston would have been proud.”
“... Day-Lewis’s performance is as good as the awards suggest: it’s big, it’s wild, yet it’s also restrained by the sparing talk of his character and framed by a film whose ambitions are bigger than his acting. That Anderson, the film’s writer-director, whose Boogie Nights was a riot but Magnolia and Punch-Drunk Love both noble failures, has come to make this intelligent and enthralling masterpiece is both a little surprising and intensely satisfying.”
UK RELEASE 15 February 2008
DIRECTOR Paul Thomas Anderson
CAST Daniel Day Lewis, Paul Dano, Dillon Freasier, Ciaran Hinds, Kevin J O'Connor
RUNNING TIME 158 minutes
COUNTRY USA
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