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February 8, 2008
There Will Be Blood
*This post is both about a month late, and definitely unfinished. I'm going to go ahead and post it now, in this little bit of calm before the storm. In lieu of my own complete review, I'd invite you to check out those written by Zach Campbell and Darren Hughes, which both come to a similar conclusion on the film's actual subject matter.
In the summer of 2006, just before principal photography began on There Will Be Blood, Paul Thomas Anderson uploaded the first of a series of vague behind-the-scenes photos to the production's unofficial website, Little Boston News. Those photos are all long gone, but chief amidst that first batch was a snapshot of a page from Moby Dick.
Anderson, it turns out, was telegraphing something of his intentions from the get go, for he's created with There Will Be Blood an American epic possessed with the same mad scope of Melville's masterpiece, and in Daniel Plainview a protagonist cast very much in the likeness of the Pequod's captain. Plainview, like Ahab, is a man consumed by fierce myopia. Whether Ahab's defining hubris is just as squarely matched is a bit harder to discern, and although it might be easy to equate Plainview's black gold with Ahab's blanced leviathan, the truth of the matter is that Plainview's goal is an abstract, as intangible as that whale's whiteness.
PTA has described the film as boxing match, distilling it down to a central conflict between Plainview and the young preacher Eli Sunday; or, in the big picture, capitalism versus religion (a thematic stalemate born of the same timely concerns that might have lead to the naming of Plainview's son, H.W.). He's also called it a horror story, noting that he modeled Plainview after Count Dracula (which in turn reminds us that, in Stoker's original novel, Dracula's chief pursuit was simply real estate). Neither comparison, I think, ultimately describes the film that Anderson made which is a portrait of one man's manifestation into himself. Daniel Plainview is a man who does not change, who eventually topples under the weight of his own limitations and, in the eyes of some, brings the film crashing down with him. The last twenty minutes are certainly anticlimactic if they're viewed as the climax of a conflict between two men; as the resolution of a character study, on the other hand, they're a fitting denouement. Like Ahab going down with his whale, Plainview's reached his goal and come out on top, even though his triumph smothers him.
And even if those last twenty minutes are a mistake (I don't believe they are), one must give Anderson and Daniel Day Lewis the benefit of the doubt and assume that in creating a character so deeply realized that he trumps his creators' own definition, they've thought forwards and backwards through every choice leading to that realization, and that, on an intrinsic level, those choices are not, in fact, wrong. If I feel that Plainview's ultimate treatment of his false brother Henry is a misstep, can I assume that the problem is not with the script but with me? Indeed, this scene, this final fraternal encounter, is where I stopped empathizing with Daniel. Up until that moment, I saw an awful lot of myself reflected in him - so is the fact that I lost touch with the film at that point the fault of my own ego?
I don't actually think it is, and I'm not out to make apologies for a film that's at least a little flawed anyway you half it, and yet all the more fascinating for being so frustrating.
I stopped writing about here. I probably would have gone on to talk about how Paul Thomas Anderson has been more influential to me than just about any other filmmaker and I don't feel like I can accurately critique his work, before continuing to critique it anyway and eventually making it back to Moby Dick and all that whiteness on the page and the equivocal blackness on the film. I wish I could write all that now. But heck, I've got a film to make.
Posted by David Lowery at February 8, 2008 12:57 AM