There Will Be Blood

There Won't Be Morals
by M.A. Fedeli



Oscar Wilde said, "Any element of morals or implied reference to a standard of good and evil in art is often a sign of a certain incompleteness of vision. All good work aims at a purely artistic effect." And so, after a viewing of P.T. Anderson's latest, There Will Be Blood (for my money the best film of 2007), this quote learned in my (not quite) halcyon college days was in mind. The film is refreshingly devoid of moral judgment. The characters are presented in all their conflicted glory, no apologies made by the film or its tone for their indiscretions, failings, and wrongdoings. But who does and what are wrongdoings anyway? Is it the ambitious oil man, with his paranoia and unapologetic capitalism, or, the manic evangelist, hiding his motives and schemes behind religion and its fables? There is good and evil in all of us, our experiences and situations help determine, then mete out which one will represent us at any given moment. If you are one who believes that there are no moral absolutes in human nature, then this may be the film for you. It is a story of ambition and the hurdles one must overcome, moral and otherwise, to achieve success. If the film has a lesson of its own, it is that lessons are irrelevant. We are all animals, some are just weaker than others.

The film is beautiful and well-crafted. P.T. Anderson continues to be a film buff's filmmaker, much like Kubrick was a filmmaker's filmmaker. PTA (as he will now be known) takes aspects of history's best directors and films and repackages them in wondrous ways that are satisfyingly unique and modern as much as they remind us of the real halcyon days of cinema. For anyone who loves 70's American cinema, Scorsese, Kubrick, Altman, Malick, Cassavetes, even back to Welles, Huston and Ford, Anderson is your man. And like Godard, he is not afraid to take chances that threaten to take you out of the world of the film. Anderson uses dialogue as art, both in its complex poetic beauty and in it's reflection of the awkward ways in which we sometimes speak it. Great confidence is needed to write dialogue that is unafraid of being not only challengingly poetic, but also clunkily realistic, and PTA exudes it in spades, unwary of having it jar the audience's accepted notions of "proper film dialogue." I admit to not liking any of PTA's earlier films the first time I saw them in theaters. I did not "get it" until a year or so after Punch-Drunk Love was released, when I gave all his films a second chance on DVD. He has since become my favorite, and I think most satisfying young American director.

This will not be a long critique, it seems much ink has already been spilled about a film most people won't have the chance to see for at least a few more weeks. Also, I myself really wanted to see it again before I got too deep with a review, but I just couldn't wait any longer to write about it. It is a purely riveting picture and the always great Daniel Day-Lewis, as patiently dedicated oilman Daniel Plainview, is excellent beyond words. As the film unfolds, we have a front row seat for the events that occur to more and more disillusion and alienate an already detached man from the world, hacking away at what little faith he has left in humanity. The picture is almost a vehicle for Day-Lewis' grinding depiction of a man's slow descent into a self-imposed, isolated madness. Paul Dano, as the savvy evangelist Eli Sunday, admirably holds his own against the world's greatest working actor. The pitting of the fierce business man vs. the zealous religious man may seem obvious on the surface, but nevertheless, the dialogue and the actors make it deliciously primal against the barren landscape and the early 20th century "small town naivete" context of the film.

Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood lends a score that is reminiscent of the darkly classical pieces used by Kubrick in 2001 and Ennio Morricone's functional score from Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West. In that film, Morricone famously made music with the sounds of various natural elements in the film's wild west location: creaky doors; dripping water; swirling winds; lumbering trains; buzzing flies; antique machinery; etc. Along with his dissonant strings playing the strains of hell (a prominent place for both the screeching preacher and the man who digs up the below), Greenwood echoes the unfeeling, dusty machinery of the desert and it's sonic similarity to the mechanical beating hearts of our main characters.

As for the hotly debated and prophetic ending, all I can say is that those people who were angry over The Sopranos' black-out, with its lack of confrontation and traditional climax, finally got their wish, their ultimate showdown. Now quit your bitching. It was orgasmic and insane and also the only logical conclusion: an epic blast after a long, slow boil; a final act of madness from a finally mad character. For further analysis, I cede to Richard Schickel's excellent summation for Time: "It is the genius (and I use that word advisedly) of Daniel Day-Lewis's performance to slowly, patiently, show the madness replacing his former rationalism, to prepare us for the film's astonishing ending, an ending one dare not reveal, but that contains what I — resistant as I am to superlatives — consider to be the most explosive and unforgettable 10 or 15 minutes of screen acting I have ever witnessed."

But enough about all that, you can check the links at the bottom for much more extensive reviews of the film than mine. What usually concerns me most with the films I watch is what they are trying to say about our species and about human nature. Without making any effort of its own to label characters "good" or "bad", There Will Be Blood addresses the demons in all of us. Whether or not we choose to chase and suppress these demons, and how much we are able to do so to make room for angels, seems to make the most difference. Add to this the sad fragility of sanity and it is easier to see what differentiates the best and worst of us. By the end of the film, both Plainview and Sunday are victims of all of these forces, of their collective experiences and lots in life, and most importantly, their ambitions.

I see Richard Nixon in Daniel Plainview. Like Nixon, Plainview is ruled by his insecurities as much as his ambitions, but he is not an inherently evil man, just a misanthrope; like the modest Nixon, he is not greedy for money in any traditional sense, only for power and the protected independence and freedom continued success can buy him; like Nixon, he is ruled in toto by insecure desires for acceptance, even from the masses, all the while viewing them as naive nincompoops; and like Nixon, Plainview is a "family man" who is capable of being fiercely loyal to his loved ones and colleagues, provided they are of benefit to his rise. Or, as he puts it: "I can't keep doing this on my own, with these... people." Plainview, even amongst a crowd, is always alone. His breathy and constipated laugh after this line confirms how much faith he has lost in the human race and the contempt with which he views it. He's learned, it seems, to take no one seriously but himself and his accomplishments.

We are challenged throughout the first two hours of the film to like Daniel Plainview because we are shown his humanity as much as his misanthropy. We are shown others who are just as conniving as he and far more corrupt, which aids to keep Plainview in proper context against the rest of the world. Many films will force you to feel a certain way about an "evil" character by overloading the emphasis on the negative or the positive, depending on the goal. There Will Be Blood recognizes the dichotomies of all men (even Hitler was married and had a faithful dog, Blondi) and allows us to make our own judgments on Plainview, the equally suspect Eli Sunday, and others in the film who rise or fall based on their ambition or ineptitude. It asks us to question ambition itself, not greed, which is a refreshingly different way of attacking the much-hashed subject of big business, captains of industry, capitalism, and the American Dream.

Ambition is necessary for any of us to succeed, of course, and as the greater devils of human nature have taught us, contained within certain unconscionable people it can sometimes lead to poverty, disease, holocaust, and war. Nevertheless, it is a survival skill. I do not think it is outside the lines to say that this film is a commentary on ineptitude and weakness as much as it is a commentary on ambition and strength, and that the weak must take some responsibility for their poor conditions. This goes for the successful man's failures to maintain control, humility or perspective as much as it goes for the foolish and apathetic who do not succeed.

We are taught to always be strong, to rise above adversity, to stand up no matter how many times we are knocked down, to find benefit from suffering. Or, as the paradoxical Richard Nixon said in his farewell address, "the greatness comes not when things go always good for you, but the greatness comes when you are really tested, when you take some knocks, some disappointments, when sadness comes, because only if you have been in the deepest valley can you ever know how magnificent it is to be at the highest mountain."

That goes for all the animals.




More excellent reviews:

Time Magazine
http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1698168,00.html
Daily Film Dose
http://dailyfilmdose.blogspot.com/2007/12/there-will-be-blood.html
N.Y. Times
http://movies.nytimes.com/2007/12/26/movies/26bloo.html
The House Next Door
(massive spoiler warning)
http://mattzollerseitz.blogspot.com/2007/12/drilling-for-art-there-will-be-blood.html
Quarter Life Comeback
http://quarterlifecomeback.blogspot.com/2007/12/tonight-faith-just-aint-enough-or-im.html
Lauren Wissot
http://www.psychopedia.com/outpost/
The Reeler
http://www.thereeler.com/reviews/there_will_be_blood.php
Thanks for the Use of the Hall
http://www.panix.com/~sallitt/blog/2008/01/i-am-not-convinced-that-p-t-anderson-is.html