A Bloody Mess

A Bloody Mess

Notes on There Will be Blood


There Will Be Blood has risen as a personal favorite among critics and audience members. The praise has been so extensive that the film only knows a few rivals for best of the year. During most years critics are able to sufficiently disagree with each on what is the best, but this year No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood have run away with most considerations. The few critics who have gone against the hype have had to issue statements in their reviews that were acknowledgements of the large leap they were taking. What sometimes happens when a film becomes universally applauded is that acceptance of agreements and disagreements gives way to a situation where the minority is just trying to get some representation. Andrew Sarris met the situation when his failure to acknowledge No Country for Old Men as a great film left readers attacking him. He responded in his annual top ten list award by giving No Country the entire category of “Movies Other People Liked and I Didn’t”. There Will Be Blood could get similar recognition for those who disliked it.

I’m not a fan of There Will be Blood. I actually dislike almost every part of the film. Most critics would be dismissive when dealing with a film of zero favor to them, but the praise and ambition of Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest is forcing me to take issue with all of the criticisms. There Will be Blood is also so large and complicated that a simple review cannot cover all the problems so I’m utilizing an old structure to tackle the film. Years ago there was such a thing as critical history books. They were critical reviews of a major film movement or era. The author(s) wanted to criticize certain periods of cinema but wanted to structure the book so it could encompass numerous ideas and trends. Thus the books were broken into shorter chapters about the individual ideas. This review will follow suit.

The Two Beliefs

The accepted conflict in There Will be Blood is with Daniel Plainview and the forces around him. His problems in the story come in numerous folds. The major one is his struggle with local Christians of a small town he goes to because of oil. Plainview disdains them for their arrogance because it impedes on his well being and business when he is trying to dig for oil. The second important conflict is with a supposed brother who shows up out of nowhere but has no real relationship to him. It’s just a man who knew his brother before he died. The third is with the illegitimate son Daniel grew to love as his own but disgraced him when he grew up to become an oil man himself and posed a threat to his business ventures. The complexities of these entanglements has made for a film that people are applauding as rich and diverse. The truth is that their only one conflict within the film. The other two are just symptoms of Daniel Plainview himself.

Daniel, like the Christians, represents an institution of belief himself. His character really is the basis of the idea of nobility and aristocracy. Daniel believes the success he has in life and power he holds over everyone comes from inert qualities within him that no one outside of his bloodline possesses. His character represents an idea of power and just cause older than even religion itself. The film simplifies his meaning when it shows him as just God-less and semi-disturbed. That is how the townspeople of Little Boston view him. The film makes his problems with his supposed brother and illegitimate son to be signs of his evil when they are indicators of deeper beliefs a lot of people held back then. There Will be Blood takes no consideration of the deeper history to Daniel’s character and instead views all of his actions at such a close barometer that they are meant to outweigh its context.

The apology could be that Daniel’s characterization is a completely personal one. Whatever the rationalization may be it is the opposite of how Eli Sunday and the other townspeople are depicted. The film shows their belief and its meaning before it shows any of their distinguishing personal characteristics. Eli Sunday is a major character but all of his scenes are standard scenes of a preacher being a preacher. The only scene that stands out to show his character flaws is where he sits at the dinner table with his family, covered in mud, and insults his father for agreeing to a deal with Daniel Plainview that he himself originally thought was fair. The scene is indicative of the personal defeats Eli will meet later, but it’s also the only scene that does it. In all the other scenes Eli Sunday represents the establishment of religion and God. He is a walking caricature of a religious man because his personal aspects are almost wholly removed.
The difference in how Eli Sunday and Daniel Plainview are shown is important. The two characters make up the dramatic center of the film. Daniel’s problems with his son, brother and business in Little Boston rise to a crescendo when he is baptized and asked to confess the sin of his abandoning his child. The event encapsulates the frustration Eli Sunday and Little Boston has with Daniel. It’s also the greatest burden for Daniel because it makes him say the things that strike hardest at his psyche. Daniel’s defeated baptism meets its own reclamation at the end of the film when Daniel forces Eli Sunday to admit he is a hypocrite and everything he said before was a power play instead of him voicing the word of God. Sunday stands firm in saying he was the voice of God, but admits he has been a liar and is the failure of his family. Tell tale signs before show Sunday had more interest in power than God. His final stand with Daniel revealed the nature of his character.

The relationship between Daniel and Eli goes even further than the dramatic principles. Their characters are both the symbolic representations of their respective beliefs and ideals. There Will be Blood is about both the personal and cultural clash that happens. The societal comment is a significant part of the film. The film has to balance both elements when sculpting the portrait of the characters. The end result is a completely divided picture. The audience only knows Daniel for his personal demons and Eli for his religious extremism. The fact that the end hangs on Eli’s “dramatic” revelation is a joke. The scene is more explanatory than dramatic because it includes so much new information about Eli. It has to because it didn’t have a character outline to base his demise off of.

Realism and Plot

Paul Thomas Anderson doesn’t make a true classical epic with There Will Be Blood. He goes against many conventions of standard storytelling devices by not basing the film on methodical scenes and structure. Normally the focus of an epic is in building up environment, plot and character. Instead Anderson puts all his effort in a narrative that has a life of its own. The film flows at a pace that heightens the personal closeness of the major characters. We follow the characters before we understand the world around them. Scenes are drawn out to recreate the atmosphere of realism within the world. There Will Be Blood is closer to a dramatic rendition of a historical epic than a filmic one. The film has an amazing back drop that could have created a much lusher and more beautiful film, but Anderson commits himself to a realism platform in which to exhibit the characters.

Anderson isn’t breaking new ground with this choice. The beginning of this kind of realism began in the 1970s with American films that were trying to venture into new arenas of storytelling. Films like A Woman Under the Influence, Mean Streets, Mikey and Nickey were beholden to the realities of the scene. John Cassavettes was the forerunner of this style and a product of avante garde theater. He was able to respect film art by using cinema verite methods, but he made films that were made to be shown in the realities of a theater setting. The stories were limited to shorter time frames and most of the scenes were long and realistic. It allowed for films to explore realism more, but the essentials of the style had to more to deal with the essentials of theater than film.

There Will be Blood represents the opposite extreme. It has a large story of dense personal history for the characters and a historical overview of the time period. It takes place over thirty years and deals with numerous objectives for a range of characters. It has everything that fits the description of a novel adaptation, namely a large plot. It is the antithesis of the realist platform because plot itself requires construction and meticulous design to allow all the strands of the story to unfold. There Will be Blood has numerous elements to attest to. Paul Sunday is only worth a scene at the beginning and a few mentions later on but his character becomes a bridge for an important revelation at the end of the film. A film focused on the construction of plot would not have allowed an important character to get such scant recognition throughout the story. This is a classical example of empty symbolism. A character becomes an important idea for a theme but has little existence within the story.

An epic in the realist format isn’t impossible. It’s just that the story cannot be chronological. Doing so let’s in all the historical and personal details that have little relevance to the themes. The realist story is based on the close encounters between characters so structural decisions are very important. The story has to be adjusted to spotlight the theme the best. The best example of a realist epic is The Deer Hunter. It is about friends torn apart in the midst of the Vietnam War. The bond and connection between them is outlined at an extended wedding scene at the beginning. The rest of the film is a cut back between horrendous moments in battle and fond memories of life and how it was before. The film could have detailed each character’s life out much more extensively, but kept their portraits within the context of the friendships. Keeping this portrait allowed us to frame the character’s lives within our memories of their happier moments. If the film was traditional it would have to be six hours long to satisfy our interest in each character.

There Will be Blood limited itself greatly by making the story chronological. It had themes and characters to relate to the audience. The choices the film made as it relates to dramatic conception and character lay out kept the film from realizing the full potential of its subject. Paul Thomas Anderson had the chance to make a lot of progress and make a film of good art, but he made filmmaking choices that became standard affair of the overrated aspects of the art circuit.

A Default Style

There Will be Blood has to be given some due. It has a very deep dramatic identity but it does many things to try to escape easy categorization. Most filmmakers resent critics because they box their films into easy categorizations. As much as a lot of filmmakers complain publically, most do little about it filmically. They continue to make films that follow standard rules of storytelling. But filmmakers like Bertrand Tavernier have openly tried to defy the attempts of criticism to objectify by making films that have no consistency relevant to any recognized structure in filmmaking. Tavernier has been successful with this in such films like A Sunday in The Country and Safe Conduct. There Will be Blood also exists to defy structural recognition by taking a difficult subject and filming it with a style and tone that distinguishes it from any other film today.

It is hard to have a straight forward conversation about the style of There Will be Blood. When Robert Altman was asked to speak about his style (something most critics claim to easily recognize), he said he had no clue about the thought process to how he filmed stories. There Will be Blood has a few nods and references to Paul Thomas Anderson’s other films, but the only recognizable development is the tone of the film being more important than the story. Boogie Nights has a lot of camera movements and shot techniques. It is also filled with elaborative editing patterns and flows at a brisk pace to keep up with the pace of a fast story filled with numerous characters and plot points. There Will be Blood has a much different construction around it. The film lingers through the story with few shot adjustment and very little editing techniques. The composition of the film is based on camera angles and a methodical tone. The actors have a lot of room for movement because the camera is always well centered, but many scenes don’t end when the dialogue does. The camera continues on with the scene because the tone it creates within the film is the most important feature.

There Will be Blood is about a historical subject that is very familiar in American folklore. A very specific genre is recalled when one deals with the Old West and the development of land to suit technological innovation. The Western genre began as the shoot ‘em up genre, but evolved to encompass most stories about the development of America west of the Mississippi River. John Ford gave the genre its aesthetic tone when he made the visuals of the land an essential character to all of his films. Robert Altman took that look deeper when he based the tone of the film on the realism of yesterday with McCabe and Mrs. Miller. Then Terrence Malick created an archetype in Days of Heaven with a tone of visualization so ambient and exalting of the landscape that his style became famous. Malick became synonymous with his work on the film that filmmakers who explored his style of visualization did so with the direct threat their work would be compared to how Malick set the original barometers.

Paul Thomas Anderson creates a style in There Will be Blood that is a mixture between McCabe and Mrs. Miller and Days of Heaven. Anderson wants the tone of the film to be observant and peaceful with respect to highlighting the landscape, but he also favors graceful movements of the camera to go in between the action and the scenes. The composition is remiscient of Days of Heaven while the movement goes back to Altman’s achievement with Mccabe. He isn’t doing much out of the ordinary with this combination of tonal styles. Most Westerns of any ambition since then have taken on the personality of either Altman or Malick’s achievements. Both films were that influential to later filmmakers. The surprise with Anderson’s decision to mix his filmmaking with these two films is that the story in There Will be Blood has both too much story and action to be the best fit.

The first reason for the assertion of too much story in There Will be Blood has to deal the structures of the former two films. McCabe and Heaven are comprable to Paul Thomas Anderson’s film only in the matter of realism, but opposites in almost every other way. Both really are poem-like expressionist works that rely very little on physical story but instead on color hues with the cinematography and tonal features in how camera investigates the story. When most films would bring the camera closer to the action, both of these films kept a distance in all the scenes. They were able to do so because the stories were simple and philosophical. When originally released, both were unique for being ambient character pieces in a time when realism constituted higher degrees of drama and violence. The easy comparison is that McCabe and Heaven reflected the wavelengths of Yasurijo Ozu when most other filmmakers embraced the tough drama of Akira Kurosawa.

The first situation with the style of There Will be Blood comes with the obscuring it does of numerous plot points through out the film. Plot points are nothing more than story and character references that help to spell out the details of the story. It gets a subplot from point A to B. Numerous examples are bound through out the film, but most glaring are scenes like when H.W. looks through Henry’s diary and then mysteriously lights fire under his bed. What the audience sees H.W. sees in the diary gives no clue to why he does what he does. It’s revealed later on, but is just a random action at the time. Then there is the presence of Paul Sunday. Paul Dano plays both Eli and Paul Sunday, but it’s never revealed they are twins. The casting was accidental in the first place but the film never tries to distinguish their differences or even make a theme out of the uniqueness they are twins. The story just goes on, but it does so with such scant characterization of Paul Sunday that the subplot is confusing. The film has a lot of information to convey to the audience but fails to do an adaquate job because better relaying it because that would force the film to deconstruct its lingering camera movements and provide a denser, more adaquate editing structure.

The second major problem with the style is how it expels the most dramatic scenes. The nature of the style is to be distant and reflective, but There Will be Blood has a confrontational force to it with a lot of scenes and moments. The purpose of editing and composition is to be able to gage the drama best when the action is heightened, but the film is sloppy at best and absurd at other major points. The easiest example is with the renunion of Daniel and H.W. Plainview after the latter was sent away. The scene begins in an open field. The camera shows their reunion in the distance, but instead of cutting closer to the scene when it becomes fiery, the camera continues to weave down an oil pipeline. It does this while the characters are having a troubling moment. The reason for this choice of filmmaking is to highlight the oil pipeline which Daniel later shows off to H.W. and also to show the new found distance between the characters. The problem is that highlighting the oil pipeline really has little significance to what matters in the scene. Then the shooting from a distance to show character distance is so elementary of a film technique it would be criticized in film schools if a student attempted to use it.

The other major example is with the final scene. Daniel Plainview and Eli Sunday start a troubling discussion that excalates to physical blows when Daniel attacks Eli in his bowling alley. His method of attack is to chase Eli around the room, throw different things at him and then finally beat him with a bowling pin until he is dead. The chase has Eli begging for mercy and hiding behind the front of the bowling frame while Daniel attacks him. Anderson does little to bring the camera closer to the confrontation. While Daniel is chasing Eli, the camera remains aloof. Even when Eli goes out of frame and hides and Daniel is severely hitting him, the camera remains aloof. The only major cut into the action the camera does is when it does a low angle pan up to Daniel and he smears some excrement onto the lens. It’s surprising Anderson chooses that technique of all things because when he has used it before it was always for expositional purposes to introduce new scenes and locations. It has little reason to be in a dramatic moment with exception to the smear on the lens. The feeling is that Anderson is just on a rotation of different film techniques to lay out the story. His concern is mainly about the tonal structures in the film.

There are numerous other examples of bad filmmaking decisions by Anderson. Only a DVD commentary could do justice to explain all the problems in the film. The style is so bad because it takes so many basic ideas of how to shoot a Western period piece and does so with little direction. The general assumption could be that Anderson looked at the backdrop of his story and made a film to look like other films that dealt with similar historical periods, but didn’t know how to make the adjustments to fit into There Will be Blood.
Final Thoughts

It’s hard to sum up There Will be Blood. The film is driven by its loose ends and intensity. Critical comment about the film is so scattered that most are impressionistic jubiliations without being detailed and specific. There even isn’t an agreed upon argument about how the film is good. The film is mostly relevant for its differences in look and feel from every other film out there.

My best summation comes with comparing There Will be Blood to another film. When The Passion of the Christ was released, it was done to notable controvery and heavy critical discussion. Social critics took exception of the film for its stereotypical image of Jews while historical critics demoted the film for its slim, almost irrevelant perspective of Catholicism. Film critics said the film tried to make up for its lack of variety in production skills with a high intensity to make the story more powerful.

There Will be Blood holds a similiar position with respect to all those subjects. The film is highly interesting, but succeeds on just a few levels of how we look at a film. It is irrelevant or clueless when other greater subjects are taken into consideration. The intensity or uniqueness of the film shouldn’t be the sole reason it is considered a masterpiece.