Reznet

There Will Be Gore

By Nancy Kelsey

Disturbing characters, a sadistically humorous plot and gratuitous gore all successfully collide in “There Will Be Blood,” starring Daniel Day-Lewis.

Our lead character is a cut-throat, pessimistic businessman devoid of the normal range of human emotion. His expertise? Using his charm and carefully staged persona to secure oil deals. The movie tracks the career of Day-Lewis’s character, Daniel Plainview, in the oil industry from a poor nobody to a petroleum god.

Day-Lewis’s performance is award-worthy and intense. He becomes a character who is both despised — and maybe I'm just weird — but also worthy of applause for his boldness.

The plot is both intricate and engaging while maintaining a borderline sense of disturbing.

Plainview’s story heightens when he moves to a small town with his son after a tip about cheap land with big oil prospects. Along the way he stomps on all decisions ethical, making way for big profits at the expense of poor ranchers in California.

He angers an aspiring big-time preacher and healer named Eli Sunday, played by Paul Dano ("Little Miss Sunshine"). Key among my favorite scenes is when Sunday comes to Plainview destitute and willing to do anything for money. After initially failing to convince Plainview to buy a hold-out piece of acreage, Plainview convinces Sunday that he will buy the land if Sunday admits two things — that he is a false prophet and that “God is a superstition.”

Then Plainview bluntly tells him that he has no use for it. The only oil that’s left, he tells him, is “drainage.” He likens the purchase of the land around it and sucking up the area’s oil to drinking his milkshake at the other side of the room with a really long straw. He doesn’t have to be right next to him to get his milkshake; nor does he have to own that parcel of land to get its oil.

The preceding events close the movie on one of the most bizarre notes I have ever seen.

The thematic elements of this film are true even to today’s society. It goes to the heart of our at times ruthless capitalist society. It speaks to the truth of real-life quashing of minority interests by the majority.

Overall, this movie is much different from what I would highly recommend. But given that it was three hours long and still wildly entertaining, garnering applause and bewilderment from the Michigan audience I was in, it is worthy of three and a half frybreads, out of reznet's highest rating of four.

Nancy Kelsey, Little River Band of Ottawa Indians, is studying journalism at the University of Nebraska graduate school in Lincoln. She is a graduate of the Freedom Forum's American Indian Journalism Institute. She interned as a reporter at The Seattle Times last summer. Next summer she'll report for The Associated Press in Boston.