I saw yesterday on Sky "oil" and I understand why they have not had great commercial success.
It 's a long story, told without discounts idealistic or romantic myth of the frontier and capitalism leads to progress and prosperity, between stony lands populated by goats and wild grass, which mixes rock, soil, oil, sweat, blood, in which God is absent or indifferent and allow charlatans unlikely to be prophets of a third revelation.
A true story too raw to please the general public, that even in an epic like this look for and hoping for a final redemption, in a conversion to the good, in a reassuring repentance, in a caress to the uncertainties of the soul.
Already the long prologue, in which the protagonist weakens the effort to find a vein of silver, completely free from noise that are not stifled moans of pain and fatigue, pickaxe on the stone that scatter sparks, it is very difficult to digest for palates accustomed to more airy overture.
The entire development of the film is a constant then punch in your gut: the seeker of the relentless hard work, oil, the superhuman effort of the workers in the bottom of the pit fill buckets and buckets, spilling into a pond smelly maybe leaving his life for a beam malfissata or too weak, the race the hoarding of land, with the underground war between hunters and large independent companies such as Standard and Union Oil, the sharp operators tricking sermons aimed at making farmers glimpse the dream of those gains to change the life of a community, like many others held out bait a flock of hungry fish, the agreement with the charlatan preacher who takes advantage of superstition and ignorance of his countrymen to govern together, including false miracle cures and false promises of wealth and prosperity of an entire community, the lean and lonely lives.
A fragment of the epic physical and powerful modern American capitalism but who knows down the well deeper, dark soul the protagonist Daniel Plainview, whom unexplained family traumas and existential ripped all feeling of pity, all human understanding and sharing, generating an ambiguous mixture of cruelty and tenderness towards the child an orphan of his workmate, who poses as child because it gives him an air of respectability and reliability that her face has no wolf, and that arm's hand furiously against the impostor who claims to be against his brother and eventually kills the preacher impostor shots bowling pins in a destructive and self-destructive alcoholic delirium, perhaps because nell'imbonitore recognize as in a mirror reflection of its image, its cunning, its ruthlessness, lies, a lifetime devoted to money and above all the desire to tear it to others, to fools, people with no quality, no dreams, no ideas.
A great movie, a great director (Peterson), a student of Robert Altman, a huge Daniel Dai Lewis, at a cast, stunning photography, a relentless and powerful soundtrack.
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