There will be blood (2007)***+

Seen on 30-8-2009 - A Star Movies film
Cast: Daniel Day Lewis (Daniel Plainview), Paul Dano (Eli Sunday)
Dir.: Paul Thomas Anderson
Loosely based on Upton Sinclair's Oil (1927)

This is about an ambitious, greedy ruthless oil prospector, Daniel Plainview, at the turn of the century. He despises and hates people to boot. He comes to the West on information that the Sunday family ranch has oil. He leases land here with false promises to build schools and hospitals, becomes rich. In the process of expanding his business he needs to build a pipeline around a hill through the farm of William Bandy who is prepared to allow him to lay the pipelines only if he gets baptized in his Church of Third Revelation. Daniel goes through the humiliating and self-abasing process to which he is subjected by the fanatic priest Eli Sunday in order to get the leasing rights. But being a man of fierce temperament he is not the one to forget his wounds. He takes it out on the evangelist Eli Sunday at the end. His monstrous treatment of his only dumb-deaf son is another instance of his devilish nature. He kills a man for deceiving him into believing that he is his long lost step-brother. He forces the religious fanatic into repeating aloud that he is a false prophet and that there is no god. After forcing him to do this, he batters him to death. He has no one who loves him, nor does he care for one. His relentless misanthropic nature is at once the cause of his success and his misery.
The film is powerful in its impact on the audience and makes it difficult to dismiss it.