There Will Be Blood

Last week we missed the Film Society season opener, The Great Dictator, but this week we got to There Will Be Blood. It was so different to the other two films I've seen this week (the class and A Serious Man); it's an epic about the discovery of oil in California. Its characters inhabit an extraordinary world where, with the oil boom and the motor-car, everything's rapidly changing. The remotest parts of the U.S. are now linked to the big industrial centres and, with the cash and the desire, a hundred mile oil pipeline running all the way to the Pacific seems perfectly feasible. What makes it interesting is, in telling the evolution of America, it captures much of the rapacious spirit of modern capitalism, this brought out beautifully in the much-talked-about ending which reminds me stylistically of a 1930's political cartoon where isms were often drawn as evil and beastly - in this case it's Daniel Day Lewis, embodiment of greed, standing over the prostrate form of religion.