Although this film has epic qualities - offering sweeping panoramas and a glimpse into a key stage in American history - it is actually quite closely focussed on the relationship between a father and his son. This is the heart of the film. The oil prospector Daniel Plainview, played by another Daniel (Day Lewis), starts out as a sympathetic character. He seems an affectionate father to the little boy whom he takes with him everywhere. At one point, he claims that the mother died in childbirth, but this is later called into question, implying a darker side to our hero. Not that he's necessarily a wife-murderer, but that he might be capable of distorting the facts for public relations purposes. Whatever the story, his love for his son seems genuine at the outset, but that love gradually becomes twisted by Daniel's growing obsession with power and money as his empire expands. Of course, the corrupting power of money ('radix malorum est cupiditas') is a Christian theme, and religion is another important strand in this film.
Daniel early comes up against the plans and ambitions of Eli Sunday, the charismatic preacher and leader of the community where Daniel makes one of his biggest killings (in the financial sense). Unfortunately, Eli has his flaws too, and is not entirely sympathetic, which means that there is no black and white moral resolution to this film. Perhaps it is the better for that. The lack of any sympathetic characters makes it quite difficult to watch in some ways; certainly it offers a dark vision of human nature. Daniel Day Lewis plays the lead with a consummate panache that is reminiscent of his performance in Scorsese's Gangs of New York. Given that he also starred in The Last of the Mohicans, one wonders if this most British actor is on a personal mission to explore the American classics! His own family background, as the son of former Poet Laureate Cecil Day Lewis, also raises the question of whether father-son relationships and the impact of ambition on that bond is another theme that preoccupies him personally; not that Cecil Day Lewis was anything like the monster that Daniel Plainview becomes. This is essentially a family tragedy on the pattern of a Faulkner novel (Absolon! Absolon! springs to mind), though it's actually based on a novel by Upton Sinclair, called simply Oil!
That America's 'black gold' has had the power to shape communities and redraw the moral landscape is established beyond question by this powerful film. The visual qualities it displays are impressive - scenes of burning pumping stations lit up against the sparse desert scenery are 'burned' in the memory - and this visual impact combined with the fine acting make it a film not to be missed.
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