There Wlll Be Blood: The First Non-Animated Movie of the Decade Worthy of Being Mentioned Among the Greatest American Films of All Time

It has taken long enough to be sure, but I finally can make the statement that I have seen a non-animated film produced in this decade that is worthy of being mentioned among the greatest American films of all time. That film is There Will Be Blood and is quite simply the most breathtaking and haunting piece of cinema I've seen since Schindler's List. At nearly three hours, I wish it had gone on for another two hours because I was intensely fascinated by everything about America that it has to say. Let's be clear: There Will Be Blood will not win the Academy Award for Best Picture. The Academy has never in its entire history honored a film that negatively critiques 20^th century America in the way that There Will Be Blood does.

First things first. You have probably heard that Daniel Day-Lewis delivers the performance of the decade in There Will Be Blood. Day-Lewis channels the voice of John Huston as a metaphor for how perception will begin to trump reality in 20^th century America. His voice is stentorian and declarative and is but another tool used to lend him gravity and authority with which to sell himself; I have not been able to stop imitating him, whether consciously or unconsciously, since leaving the theater. His character, Daniel Plainview, will become the prototypical 20^th century American of the movies. Right now that title is probably held either by Charles Foster Kane or Michael Corleone, but Plainview trumps them both and all other contenders because he is meant to be a symbol of the conflict and the war that ravaged across the landscape of American during the last century and has brought here to the 21^st century. Daniel Plainview is a man who asserts that he never looks past the surface of human beings to determine if there exists anything beneath the surface that may contradict first impressions. Plainview admits that he feels what Americans are taught to believe inside but deny in public: he wants no one else to succeed.