It is a film that makes you flinch, and not because it is gory or merely because some people meet horrific deaths.
This is a film that -- while being essentially about one man and his overreaching, ruthless ambition -- becomes a commentary for both the emergence of America as a nation (a grim look at the graveyard that much-vaulted American Dream stands on) as well as the human condition itself.
As characters in the film take morally shaky decisions, somewhere, in the pit of our stomach, we recognize our own flaws, the fissures in our surfaces. Anderson strikes at us like a hard kick to the stomach, and he comes up with fluid. Only here, it's bile.
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