Like the oil of the film’s subject, Daniel Day-Lewis is a precious commodity, seldom accepting roles and rarely granting interviews. Known as one of the film industry’s greatest character actors, his elusive talent is almost paradoxically brazen in its accomplishment. Having starred in only 3 films in the last decade, Day-Lewis has nonetheless been recognized with 11 Academy and Golden Globe Award nominations, and recently captured both the 2007 Golden Globe and Screen Actors’ Guild Awards for Best Actor in his current film, “There Will Be Blood.”

Ah, yes, “There Will Be Blood.” Director Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest historical epic - based loosely on Upton Sinclair’s muckraking novel “Oil!” - is the absolute perfect cup of tea for the British actor’s talent for sweeping period pieces. Day-Lewis, who terrified audiences with his portrayal of Jack the Butcher in Martin Scorcese’s “Gangs of New York” in 2002, is particularly cunning in his deliberate pursuit of his character’s psychological complexities. “There Will Be Blood” is no exception, with the actor cursing and writhing as Daniel Plainview, an obsessive oil tycoon intent on the destruction of his enemies - both business and personal. The film will not leave its audiences satisfied, but only in an interpretive sense, as it twists issues of morality, faith, and lust. The London Times calls the epic an examination of “the corrosive effect of wealth and unchecked ambition on the soul.” There will be blood.

The direction of this epic is absolutely brilliant both in its monumental visuals and its experimental audio (the soundtrack was written by Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead). Led by Day-Lewis’ anguished, tyrannical obsession and set against the murky blacks and violent reds of early 20th century oil production, Anderson’s approach is both manipulative and metaphorical; and despite significant changes to the literary text on which it is based, “There Will Be Blood” does a great service to the vision of one of America’s greatest social and industrial muckrakers. Somewhere, in some perhaps distant place, Upton Sinclair has lifted his pen - if only for a moment - and smiled.

Rating: 5/5