There Will Be Blood
Grade: A-

Paul Thomas Anderson's first outing since 2002's brilliant Punch-Drunk Love is both astounding and confounding. Loosely based on Oil! - Upton Sinclair's 1927 muckraking novel - it eschews the source material's playful satiric tone for that of a hellfire and brimstone sermon. The story is set in the early 1900s and Anderson uses the greedy oil baron exploits of one Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis, totally frightening and brilliant) to comment on the ongoing rape of the earth for oil and wealth, regardless of the devastating consequences to the environment and humanity. By staging epic, devastatingly beautiful tableaux of gushing oil and oil derrick conflagrations, Anderson seems to be saying that we're not waiting for the Apocalypse. It already happened in the oil fields of Southern California 100 years ago and we're still paying the price for all that avarice. If my theories are a bit far-reaching this morning it's probably due to my dang head cold. I'm really spaced out.

There Will Be Blood is swimming in strengths, including it's loving homages to master filmmakers Terrence Malick and Orson Welles. The film is so dense that it will certainly require multiple viewings to take everything in, but one viewing was enough for me to know that I'm not wild about Paul Dano's spirited but stilted performance as a fundamentalist preacher. Considering that the film only tackles the first 100 pages or so of Sinclair's lengthy novel, the 2 1/2 hour running time seems indulgent on Anderson's part, and it feels like he's beating his agenda to a pulp by throwing in melodramatic plot twists that are nowhere to be found in the novel.

Oh, and the brooding, Shining-esque score by Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood is magnificent, even though it's a bit invasive at times.