Oil and water don’t mix.
Taking that past the metaphor stage, commerce and religion don’t mix. In Paul Thomas Anderson’s THERE WILL BE BLOOD, Daniel Plainview is a conflicted man. He needs people– people to work with him, people to trust him and give him their land, people just to talk to. But as he tells his long-lost step brother Henry Brands, Daniel doesn’t like people. He looks at them and he sees “nothing worth liking.” At that moment, we the audience should look at Daniel and be repulsed by him, see “nothing worth liking” in him but, as portrayed by Daniel Day-Lewis, Daniel is a charismatic and mesmerizing showman. And he is also something of a lier.
Much like NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN, people are talking about the last part of THERE WILL BE BLOOD. I assume they mean the point where the movie jumps to 1927 and we see Plainview well after his prime living in his own stately Xanadu (see CITIZEN KANE, not Olivia Newton John.) Plainview, fully given in to his own madness and reclusiveness, is hunkered down in his estate and takes two visitors, his son H.W., and Eli, the driven charismatic preacher who wanted a piece of Plainview’s soul and fortune years ago. H.W. and Eli were little more than boys for most of this film while Plainview was in control. Now, they are men while Plainview’s grip on reality is obviously slipping. Plainview will say and do anything to try and keep upper hand in those relationship– a control he’s had throughout all of their lives.
Now, the ending of BLOOD isn’t nearly as out of left field as NO COUNTRY’s ending but it’s still a marked change from the majority of the film in setting and tone. These two young men come to see Plainview, to reach out to him as a father, as a friend and as a provider and he, in two very different ways, rejects them. Plainview has always rejected people who show weakness, such as his brother Henry Brands, who Daniel can never fully accept. Daniel tries to accept Henry and to show him brotherly love but something keeps nagging at the back of Daniel’s mind and here Daniel’s instincts end up being correct. There are reasons to reject Henry, even if Daniel’s methods are somewhat extreme.
Eli Sunday is an interesting character– a preacher who barely speaks of God from a family that pretends to know God. This family gives Daniel the opening into their small town and to the oil deposits that feed Daniel’s drive for more and more oil. Money seems to be part of Plainview’s desires but it’s more the desire for more and more status and prestige as driven by more oil wells that drive Plainview. Eli is a similarly driven character but his actual gain often falls far short of his desires. He wants to be an important person like Daniel. He wants the respect and even fear of his congregation. He wants to control the people through his own voiced and personality like Daniel does and maybe if Daniel wasn’t there, Eli could but he always exists in Daniel’s long and dark shadow, even at the end. He will never be Daniel and it costs him dearly.
In the end, Eli keeps calling Daniel “brother,” and in many ways, Eli is more Daniel’s brother and family than Henry is. But if there’s one thing that Daniel is not big enough for, it’s family. There’s barely any room for H.W., Daniel’s son. H.W. functions more as a prop, a partner, a friendly face and even as an anchor than as a son or as family. When we first see H.W. as an infant, it is not even clear whose child he is as one of Daniel’s workers cradle the boy. Throughout the movie, H.W. and Daniel have a troubled and difficult relationship that can only end when one of them eventually renounces the other. There can be no happy ending for this family and that’s what the last few scenes are about– the dissolution of a extremely non-functional family.
THERE WILL BE BLOOD is going to be a movie difficult to talk or write about coherently until I’ve been able to see it a few more times. I figure the DVD should be out before summer. It is a large, grandiose film, the kind of which seems to be making a bit of a comeback lately. It knows its own importance and knows that its an epic. After making the much quieter PUNCH DRUNK LOVE, P.T. Anderson returns the largess of film making that he played with in BOOGIE NIGHTS and MAGNOLIA. He returns to the largess of films that are made to be classics, made to be important and epic. There’s quite a bit bravura in his film making, from the 2001-like opening to the maddening ending, this has to be one of the most calculated films of last year. That’s not necessarily a criticism, just an observation.
It may be cheating a bit but if/when the DVD is released this year, I can see another 52 movie entry exploring this movie a bit more.