about that blood
I finally saw There Will Be Blood last night, and must admit to some disappointment. As someone who think that Magnolia is one of the best films of the past twenty years — maybe the best — and who even liked Punch-Drunk Love, I had pretty high hopes for this one, and it didn’t live up to them. To be sure, P. T. Anderson’s cinematic imagination is at work here in some powerful ways: the teasing, the unsolved puzzles, the characters who even in their acts of self-revelation leave us more confused than we were to start with. And he has some new tricks up his sleeve that enrich the narrative: for instance, having characters age at different rates, or in one case not at all; having some characters (most notably the protagonist, Daniel Plainview) speak in period style, while others (most notably his enemy from Standard Oil) use a completely contemporary idiom.But I think Anderson’s decision to tell a story from the past — to leave the contemporary (or nearly contemporary) world in which he has worked so far — cuts him adrift from his own filmmaking style. All through the movie I kept thinking about the movies that this one is visually indebted to: Giant above all, but in some scenes Terence Malick’s extraordinary Days of Heaven, and there’s even a scene near the end — our first look at Plainview’s bowling alley — that echoes the shots of the hotel hallway and elevator in The Shining. (And doesn’t blood come pouring out of that elevator at one point? Hmmmm.)
And then, not visually but narratively, there’s the enormous debt to Citizen Kane, another movie whose climax is a scene in which an utterly isolated old man — a man who rose from rural poverty to great wealth, and is living in a house far too big for him — staggers around in a destructive rage. That echo works, I think, partly because of the ways in which Plainview’s story differs from Charles Foster Kane’s; and it gives the concluding scene more force than it would otherwise have, especially since Anderson seems determined in that scene to kick the props out from under his whole movie. But the rest of the echoes seem to me merely derivative.
And yes, Daniel Day-Lewis is great. He’s absolutely riveting. But given his acting chops, and given the part Anderson wrote for him, he could scarcely have been anything but. Yes, go ahead and give him the Oscar, he deserves it — in exactly the same way that Meryl Streep deserved an Oscar for Sophie’s Choice, another movie that highlights the magnificence of its lead actor at the expense of the story and, I think, at the expense of our interest in the character the actor is playing.
No one could be more of an actor’s director than Anderson. If I were an actor, I’d offer to work for him for free, because I’d know he would cut me loose. Most of the actors in an Anderson film get at least one chance to pull out all their stops, and that’s often wonderful to watch. But here’s the interesting thing: when all the other actors are playing their scenes for every last drop they can squeeze out of them, the actor who chooses restraint can often be the most affecting, the most powerful. So when I think of Magnolia my mind doesn’t go first to the meltdowns of the Tom Cruise and Julianne Moore characters, even though I think those are great scenes. No, the first thing I think of is the way Philip Seymour Hoffman just listens to the dying Jason Robards, or John C. Reilly blurting out to his date, “I lost my gun.” The most restrained actors in that film are the most memorable ones. And while Daniel Day-Lewis is many things in There Will be Blood, many powerful things, “restrained” isn’t one of them.
“…and it gives the concluding scene more force than it would otherwise have, especially since Anderson seems determined in that scene to kick the props out from under his whole movie.”
I’ve seen multiple critics say something similar about the ending, but I’m utterly baffled as to why. (Spoilers ahead, of course.)
As you note, TWBB is basically a variation on the theme of Citizen Kane, but whereas Kane’s tragedy is simply that his vast wealth won’t get him what he really wants, Plainview’s story instead involves him destroying things – his son’s hearing, murdering his “brother”, killing his relationship with his son bit-by-bit and finally murdering Eli in the last scene – in the course of building his empire.
Now, there’s probably a big argument to be had about why Plainview is so destructive (though there’s clearly some implied critique of oil itself in the movie) but the final scene in the bowling alley, to my mind, is just the logical and obvious endpoint (“I’m finished.”) of Plainview’s character arc. The movie’s considerably more blunt about showing that arc than Citizen Kane, but I really don’t understand why anybody would suggest the ending is not of a piece with what went before.
— Chris · Jan 23, 07:18 PM · #
Chris, that Daniel kills Eli is of a piece with what went before, for sure, but it’s the way the scene is staged that, as I put it in my post, seems to deliberately kick the props from under the whole film. “I drink your milkshake”? “Drrrraaaainnnaaage”? Those are obviously absurdist moments. And chasing Eli around the alley with a bowling pin? Eli squealing, dropping down on one side of the backstop, popping out the other? That’s a Three Stooges setup, pure and simple – it could be Moe chasing Curly. So why do it that way? That’s the question people are asking, and it seems to me a reasonable enough one, even though I can come up with some plausible answers.
— Alan Jacobs · Jan 23, 07:58 PM · #
“And chasing Eli around the alley with a bowling pin? Eli squealing, dropping down on one side of the backstop, popping out the other?”
But that shot mirrors a shot from earlier in the movie, where Plainview chases his son behind a bush. (It’s nearly identical.) The film doesn’t become absurdist in that last scene.
— Dave · Jan 23, 08:23 PM · #
Dave: yes, pretty much everything in that last scene mirrors something earlier in the movie. For instance, it starts with Daniel sleeping on a floor and someone having trouble waking him, which happens twice earlier; and all three times that image is associated with violent death. That’s what I mean when I say there are “plausible answers” to the questions the film raises for some viewers. I don’t think P. T. Anderson does any of this stuff casually. But I think it’s fair to say that when an incredibly tense and dramatic and (ultimately) tragic scene centers on the phrase “I drink your milkshake” – well, that’s just a trifle unusual. As is Eli’s ludicrous dancing and squealing, even (or especially) because it echoes an earlier scene – or several earlier scenes, to be precise.
This is not unique to Anderson, of course. One of the greatest films ever made takes exactly the same risks at its climax: The Rules of the Game. But scenes like that are risky, they’re not normal, they’re meant to raise questions and make viewers uncomfortable. Scenes like that will simply not work for some viewers and that’s kind of the point. If you don’t acknowledge that something at least potentially absurd is going on at the end of There Will Be Blood – that there’s a reason why some people in the audience giggle as Daniel is chasing Eli around the bowling alley – then you’re not giving Anderson enough credit for stretching the boundaries of cinematic narration. As Jean Renoir did seventy years earlier.
— Alan Jacobs · Jan 23, 08:38 PM · #
Alan, thanks for clarifying what so many people are trying to get at. That said, I think I’m still on Dave’s side here: if you’re acknowledging that there’s a reasonable, consistent explanation for what happens in the last scene, that it fits in with what comes before, then it seems odd to single out that last scene as being something special.
It seems as if it would be more correct to say – if you do find the last scene so remarkable – that Anderson has carefully built up specific threads that make sense in context, individually, but produce a absurd effect when combined. In which case it’s not really the last scene itself that’s so remarkable, but the way the entire film has been structured to lead up to it.
Of course, the flip side of that is that you’ll only be really impressed with what Anderson’s done if you find the last scene particularly impressive or interesting… which I didn’t. And I gotta wonder if, film school issues aside, many people would – Plainview’s character isn’t that interesting ( I can think of more than a few inhumanly obsessive types in cinema who I’ve found much more intriguing), and we don’t really see enough of Eli to get worked up about the fact that he’s become corrupted, or even that he gets killed. The only really relatable character in the movie is Plainview’s son, and his plot thread is wrapped up before the bowling alley scene, which leaves… what, exactly, other than the terminal point of an unceasingly cynical, misanthropic personality?
— Chris · Jan 23, 10:33 PM · #
Chris, I would argue that a scene in a film can be thoroughly and carefully thought out, planned for, led up to, and still not work because of faults intrinsic to the scene itself. And that may be the case here, though I’m not sure. But your response raises a larger and (I think) more interesting question: Given everything that leads up to that final scene, could Anderson have filmed his conclusion in any way that would have been successful? How you answer that depends, I suppose, on how interesting and/or coherent a character you think Daniel Plainview is.
— Alan Jacobs · Jan 23, 10:49 PM · #
Alan, yes, I think you’re right – the last scene works only insofar as you’ve bought into the movie at that point… or at least, bought into the idea that the movie is really about what a miserable human being Plainview is, rather than that the movie’s about, say, the relationship between Plainview and his son. (I could have seen the movie just as easily dropping the confrontation with Eli, for example, and adding on yet another scene showing how Daniel and H.W. still further evolve once they become “competitors”.)
And don’t get me wrong, I don’t hate the last scene or anything – it just doesn’t stand out for me the way it seems to for many people… probably because, as you say, a lot of those people really buy into Plainview’s character in a big way.
— Chris · Jan 24, 12:45 AM · #
It’s a pretty bizarre scene, and it caught me totally by surprise. I think that that might have more to do with the time jump, though, then the tonal shift. “I drink your milkshake” is pretty weird, but a lot of Plainview’s lines in Little Boston are equally jarring and over the top. And the moment when he forces Eli to denounce his faith is perfectly of a piece with their ongoing rivalry. Without the time break relieving so much narrative tension, I don’t think the uptick in absurdity would be all that noticeable. But, okay, my initial reaction to that scene was that it changed the meaning of everything that had come before it.
I don’t know, absurdism is my bag, and I loved There Will Be Blood. My other favorite movie this year was The Ten.
— Dave · Jan 24, 03:06 AM · #
One strange thing that nobody has talked about is that the real life of Edward Doheny, the California oil man from Fon du Lac whom the movie is based on, was more dramatic and entertaining than Daniel Plainview’s fictional life. For example, Doheny was the central figure in the infamous Teapot Dome scandal. And his son and his son’s secretary, who were to be witnesses in the old man’s trial, died one night in 1929 in Southern California’s grandest mansion in a murder-suicide that remains unsolved, a case that heavily influenced the future writing career of an LA oil executive named Raymond Chandler.
Why did Paul Thomas Anderson skip such inherently fascinating material?
— Steve Sailer · Jan 24, 08:50 AM · #
Much of the discussion here I is to focused on the literal. At the end of the day Plainview is not so much a man but rather a thing, a metaphor that needs to be examined in a modern context. Let’s not focus so much on milkshake as “I am finished” one of the most profound and provocative end lines in movie history. The repetition of scenes or action is a traditional storytelling tool foreshadowing of things to come. Let’s not concern ourselves with who the characters are based on but rather what the characters represent
— jonathan · Jan 26, 01:44 PM · #
At the risk of sounding naive, I’d like to suggest that TWBB isn’t Really about any One thing.
Is Plainview a miserable human being? Yes. Or maybe it depends on how much one projects one’s own sense of dread onto Plainview’s existence. I think the film gives us more of a parallel to C.F. Kane than a telling of Plainview’s own despair. Granted, Plainview is sleeping on the floor in the last scene, and that seems symptomatic of misery, but as someone observed, the guy never did sleep in beds. But maybe I’m wrong and he’s just Always been miserable.
I don’t think TWBB is primarily about his relationship with H.W., either. Until his final scene, H.W. is little more than a prop (although a sad one), for Daniel and for us. The scene where he becomes a real person with free agency must be his last; he transforms from a prop into a person, and Plainview hates people, cannot abide them.
That final scene worked for me. I’d been waiting for the milkshake line for over two hours, and I had plenty of time to ponder what it would mean. Was there milkshake technology in the late 1920s? I don’t know.
Now, Eli’s whimpering is absurd, but that made me uneasy and planted a seed of dread regarding what was to come. I concede that, in some sense, it might as well have been Moe and Curly running around that bowling alley, but I find it very hard to believe that an auteur like Anderson would fumble the last scene. I’d argue that he is getting a lot of work done in a lot of different ways. Anderson has foreshadowed absurdity with the wildly out-of-place “brother from another mother” line. The bowling pin chase moves the plot forward, but at the same time perhaps it serves as a critique of ALL the films that have gone before and wrapped up complex character lines with violence. In any case, those two extra blows with the pin were the most cringe-inducing acts of screen violence I’ve witnessed since every scene of “Green Street Hooligans.” Only in TWBB, we never actually see the blows land.
There’s so much wrapped up in the Plainview/Eli relationship that I will be pondering it for days. Isn’t it fair to say that the film is dealing with the dialog between capitalism (and, by extension, modernism) and religion? I mean the particular brands of both that are uniquely American: Plainview’s market, restricted only by the scant code of the market itself, and Eli’s church, ungoverned by any ecclesiastical body at all. I could only begin to talk about that relationship as delineated by the film (religion never ages, never “grows up,” only becomes corrupt, etc), but I can’t stop wondering why Plainview is “finished” only after killing the prophet.
— Aaron · Jan 26, 07:52 PM · #