There Will Be Blood

Daniel Day-Lewis is back, and with a searing performance that burns anyone8217;s chances of holding that Oscar statuette on February 25. As an oil prospector with few scruples, driven by love for discovering oil and hatred for almost everything and everyone else, he is ruthless.

And if he is the devil, pitted against him is a teenager out to fool the world into believing he is a prophet. Where Daniel Plainview Day-Lewis uses cunning and fear, Eli Sunday Dano uses guile. Both are mining the impoverished Little Boston town of California for the maximum they can squeeze out of it.

Exquisitely detailed, There Will Be Blood has long passages where characters go without speaking. Not only do the scenes speak for themselves, you can hear their minds at work. You can also see Plainview8217;s gradual descent from cold ambition to malevolent madness.

The time is the end of the 19th Century and the beginning of the next. Plainview has just got into oil prospecting, when one of his partners dies down a well and leaves a baby behind. Plainview decides to raise the child as his own.

Soon after that, he gets a tip-off about the huge deposits of oil underneath the Sunday ranch in Little Boston. Taking the boy with him to give the impression of a happy family, Plainview goes about acquiring the area in and around the ranch, and getting into the big league.

However, when an accident leaves the boy he has come to reluctantly love deaf, he loses the rest of his faith in humanity. The final blow is dealt when a man he believes to be his long-lost half brother turns out to have been lying all along.

From then on, Plainview lives for himself, till the catastrophic end when he and Eli, so alike in their single-minded goals and so intense in their hate for each other, clash one last time.

There Will Be Blood isn8217;t perfect, with passages that drag in its two and a half hour length. But none of it matters when Day-Lewis with his brooding intensity and Dano with his chalk-faced pretentiousness come onscreen.

Day-Lewis, who garners awards almost every time he appears on screen and that isn8217;t often, has a sure winner on his hands.