I Drink Your MILKSHAKE!

There Will Be Blood OOOO (4 Hallows out of 4)
Rated R for some violence.

I’m taking a break from Saleianity this week, mainly because I have to put a financial report into the weekly parish bulletin, and I spent too much time on the Theology of the Body and getting the Spanish edition of the blog up and running this past weekend.

But I did find time to take in a movie. This was done in the privacy of my room, so as you can guess it was a DVD, and so not a first run picture (no piracy here). In the spirit of "better late than never," it was 2007’s “There Will Be Blood,” based loosely on the Upton Sinclair novel “Oil!”. I understand writer-director P.T. Anderson only used the first 150 pages as a jumping off point for the story, though catapulting seems like a better way of putting it. This is one of the most unusual movies I've seen in the last few years, and I mean that as a compliment. Anderson leaves the viewer to make up his own mind as to what is going on without making things overly confusing, a favorite tactic of film makers who really have nothing to say but want to pretend. This wasn't as gory as I thought it was going to be, but it is brutal; not for the faint hearted.

I must say, I feel bad I didn’t see this one on the big screen when it came out. While Daniel Day Lewis certainly deserved his Oscar, (he has a couple of scenes where he's his usual out of body self) this is really a visual picture. There’s no dialogue for about the first ten minutes, and even after that the actors use facial expressions to project their thoughts and emotions more than words. The always exciting cinematography moves seamlessly between claustrophobic and sweeping, with the barren desert, that serves as the setting for the middle portion of the story, becoming almost a character itself. (As I bother to flip the DVD case over I see that Robert Elswit won for best cinematography, which makes sense)

I would be amiss not to point out that the film does go in for some tried and true anti-religious stereo typing. Eli Sunday, a Pentecostal style minister played by Paul Dano, is a fraud and anyone who is religious is either a fool or a conniver. It would be nice to see a movie where religion and religious people are actually taken seriously, and while the variation on this tired theme is handled more subtly than in most recent pictures, it’s still not very original. It seems like the only theology we get in films these days is the twisted kind found in certain horror movies, with all religious people being treated like Eli Sunday, only crasser. I long for the days of Carl Malden’s Fr. Barry or even Jason Miller’s Fr. Karras, but alas I fear they have passed away, hopefully not forever.

To be fair, the Godless are even worse. Lewis’ Daniel Plainview is a murderous, misanthropic maniac who brooks no competition in his pursuit of oil wealth. At the beginning he shows real humanity in the tender way he treats his son, but as the story progresses he becomes more and more erratic and violent as he pursues the digging of an oil well in a far off desert town.

But it would be an oversimplification to say Plainview is motivated strictly by money or even power. No, simple greed is left as Rev. Sunday’s great vice. Plainview is a man without family or roots who fosters an inner rage that we are left to guess at. He never reconciled with his estranged father before his death, and every close relationship he has turns out to be fake somehow. By his own admission he hates most people, but there is something in him that yearns for connectedness. He is constantly disappointed in the people who represent themselves as family and often with reason, but his disappointments provoke violence and drive him deeper into himself and his work. He becomes an isolated bitter man, trusting no one but a longtime adviser. Ultimately he rejects the only person who truly loves him because his entire life has been built on a competition that grants him only a hollow victory.

A.O. Scott, the fine film critic for the New York Times, took issue, in an otherwise enthusiastic review, with the story veering off into a psycho drama rather than expanding its critique of capitalism. But I think you could argue that in the character analysis of Plainview lies the social commentary. Plainview is successful at every turn, and even his apparent defeats turn out to be victories in the end, yet the more he gains the more and more he devolves into madness and isolation. For the purposes of the story Plainview is the embodiment of the capitalist system, a system built on a greed that can never be satisfied; a greed that destroys the bonds of family and society; a system that is dehumanizing and in the end self destructive. This isn't my view of capitalism, to be sure, but the one argued by the film through the warped mind of Daniel Plainview.

If you haven't picked it up by now, this is not a feel good movie. It has a dark, pessimistic view of humanity where almost everyone is not what they present themselves to be as they grasp for wealth and security. Plainview is the only transparent one here simply because the palpable contempt he has for all those around him makes his attempts at deception seem halfhearted. He hates people, and he doesn't care who knows it. The only sympathetic figures in the story are HW, Plainview’s son, but he has to suffer a disabling injury to earn that right, and Mary Sunday, Eli’s sister. They are the sole bright spots in an otherwise dark universe.

“There Will Be Blood” is a movie that defies easy analysis, and while I had problems with it’s view of human nature, to put it mildly, it was refreshing to see an American film that made me think without resorting to tricks and gimmicks.