"Okay, Dan, I'm going to turn down your acting just a notch. It may sting a little."

There Will Be Blood is a portrait of a man consumed by ambition and greed, a single-minded oilman who has no mind for anything but the next big strike. Pointing at the one section of a map of the region without his name on it, he petulantly asks his real estate agent, “Why don’t I own this?” because of course he must own everything. Kind of silly, really, since owning everything still doesn’t make him happy. Gee, you think maybe that’s the point?

Daniel Day-Lewis stars as Daniel Plainview, the man for whom winning isn’t enough; everyone else also has to lose. Plainview is a big character, one who writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson clearly hopes will live through the ages, this generation’s Charles Foster Kane.

Let’s get something out of the way right now, and it may shock and upset you. I don’t like Daniel Day-Lewis. Your cries of, “but he’s the best actor of his generation” are lost on me, because honestly, I think he’s showy and mannered. I can always see him acting, and thinking about acting, and not BEING his character. I feel like I can hear him calculating: “I’ll squint into the sun in 3 . . . 2 . . . 1 . . . now” or “I’m going to start off really soft and then GET REALLY LOUD.” So you can see that his towering presence here is a strike against the movie in my book, though it’s oddly appropriate for Plainview, a character who is tailor-made for a showy performance. (Not a compliment.)

Still with me? Okay. In spite of this, I kind of liked There Will Be Blood, at least parts of it. Anderson does a fantastic job of creating this turn of the century world. The decades-long battle between the ruthless Plainview and a manipulative preacher named Eli Sunday (Paul Dano) is engrossing, though Anderson gives us at least one more chapter in Plainview’s life than I really needed to see. There’s a wordless sequence at the beginning where we watch Plainview toil at mining, then oil drilling, relentlessly battling with harsh conditions and failing tools until he builds his business, that’s absolutely mesmerizing. There are some excellent elements in the movie. Too bad that the impression I’m left with is of an overwrought performance of an overblown character.

Gorilla Pants rating: 2 out of 4 bananas