Despite its excellence, There Will Be Blood didn’t do much for me. Daniel Day-Lewis’s performance as a sociopathic oil prospector during the early 1900s is impressive, and he’ll probably win an award for it, but it feels too much like Bill the Butcher from Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York. It’s not a bad film, but I lost interest well before the finale. And there is blood.
Daniel Day-Lewis makes this movie. Man, is he good. The movie is about a guy who lives on what used to be a commune, growing his own food, generating his own electricity, etc. All the other commune folks left years ago, and he’s holding out with his daughter in their old wooden house while suburbs are being built all around him. If you’re not so fond of “progress” as made manifest by Wal-Marts and rows and rows of houses that look exactly the same, you’ll like The Ballad of Jack and Rose. I totally dug it.