Blood runs cold

Rating: 7/10 (2 March 2008)

A bowling pin.
A bowling pin is used as a murder weapon at the end of THERE WILL BE BLOOD. It proves to be a perfectly effective means of committing a killing, but you have to ask "Why a bowling pin?" At it's center, THERE WILL BE BLOOD is about a confrontation between the rewards of capitalism and the glories of religion -- the material versus the spiritual -- so of all the possible symbolic weapons that filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson could have selected for the killing -- a crucifix, a golden trophy, a mining tool -- why would he end his film using such a mundane thing as a bowling pin as a weapon? Maybe it is not that important, but it is strange that a film that carefully builds in mesmerizing power in the first half, only to see its sense of grandeur slowly dissipate in the second, would ultimately end in a scene so grim, yet unintentionally comic. What could have been and should have been one of the most powerful scenes in the film ends up being just curiously odd, with the horror of the action sapped by the lack of irony in the selection of the death tool.
The film deals with Daniel Plainview, who rises from being a turn-of-the-century, dirt-poor prospector to being an oil tycoon. From prospecting for silver to striking oil to building an empire and helping a city rise out of the desert, the film reflects the building of America during an era when the Duponts and the Gettys and the Rockefellers grew into titans, slowly dragging the rest of the country up the ladder of prosperity with them. Director-writer Anderson generates both a sense of awe and giddy exhilaration as he charts Daniel's wheelings and dealings and manipulations, going beyond wealth to raw power. It is the American Dream in all of it's thrilling glory. The first half of THERE WILL BE BLOOD is masterfully told.
But, as is the way with most visions of capitalism in Hollywood, the dream (or the dreamer) must be destroyed in the second half. That is to be expected; but as skillfully as Anderson shapes Daniel's rise, his means of destroying the dream is clumsy and lacking irony. Like a balloon that doesn't pop, but merely deflates, the second half of the film just shrinks to nothing. Daniel goes mad, but for reasons that are neither clear nor well articulated. The big gusher that secures Daniel's mega-wealth coincides with an accident that causes his adopted twelve-year-old son to go deaf. Despite his love for his son being unquestioned to this point, Daniel abruptly rejects the damaged child and embarks on a series of random plot twists. Nothing in the second half really flows logically, other than the assumption that success has driven Daniel insane. When he is shamed into reclaiming his son and manipulated by greed into receiving baptism, two things that might redeem him, they instead drive him further into madness. The film suggests that if religion is an opium to the masses, it is sheer poison to Daniel. That glib explanation isn't enough.
But as poorly plotted as the film becomes, the biggest weakness in BLOOD is in the handling of the religious theme. Daniel's adversary throughout is Eli Sunday, a teenage preacher in the small Texas town that Daniel buys up and takes over. Though played well enough by Paul Dano, Eli is a weak character, not just morally but dramatically. The rivalry between the two is one-sided and no matter what Eli does, we never feel he will get the best of Daniel. I think Anderson sees the concept of religion as being just as corrupting as greed. He wants us to know right off the bat that Eli is, if not evil, at least fraudulent. He wants us to dislike him immediately and that is what Dano does with little subtlety, playing the boy evangelist as arrogant and devoid of charm, grace or sincerity. If we lose sympathy for Daniel, we never feel it at all for Eli, even when we should.
Thus, the final confrontation falls flat. Going in we know that Eli is a false prophet, so when Daniel humiliates him and crushes him, there is no surprise and no sense of justice or victory on Daniel's part. Had Eli been established as a seemingly strong and noble character, and then Daniel succeeded in bullying him into denouncing God, that would have been a devastating climax. Or if the apparently weak-willed Eli had unexpectedly stood up to Daniel and confirmed that his belief in the power of God is stronger, that could have crushed Daniel and that would have been a powerful climax. But, as is, Anderson gives us a surprisingly violent ending where one evil character destroys another character of lesser evil, thus proving nothing about either greed or religion.
Even with Anderson's craftsmanship behind the camera, the film is almost a one-man show, with Daniel Day-Lewis as Plainview propelling the story through even the sluggish second half almost totally on the strength of his dynamic performance. That alone guarantees that the film is never dull. Yet, for all of this forcefulness, I don't think Daniel Plainview ever becomes a three dimensional character. The film suffers from a dearth of interesting supporting characters for Day-Lewis to interact with, but more to the point, in showing how isolated Plainview is from others, the film never lets the character reveal himself to the viewer either. It is a big, glorious performance of a character who remains surprisingly small and empty.
Anderson clearly wants THERE WILL BE BLOOD to be an epic just as much as Plainview wants to amass wealth. But just as Plainview finds that wealth without purpose is meaningless, Anderson shows us that the same is true about style without insight.