Spoil­ers, as always.

My sis­ter and I went to see There Will Be Blood yesterday.

Upton Sinclair’s novel Oil!, on which the film is based, is lit­tle in evi­dence, thank­fully. I do not enjoy Sin­clair, because his nar­ra­tives expect the reader to sym­pa­thize with his Social­ist views. I am a mis­er­able fail­ure at sym­pa­thiz­ing with Socialists.

I was wor­ried that There Will Be Blood would be all anti-​​industrial in theme, and it mostly wasn’t. The first three acts are really quite good. Plain­view is com­pe­tent and knows it. He puts on a hard sell, but he doesn’t swin­dle peo­ple. He expects only what is com­ing to him. The vil­lain, by con­trast, is a per­fectly loath­some, manip­u­la­tive faith-​​healer con-​​man in whose ulti­mate destruc­tion we delight.

The first three acts, like I said, are really quite good. The last two acts, start­ing when Plainview’s “brother” shows up, didn’t make any sense. Plainview’s devo­lu­tion into drink and hate doesn’t make sense. There was no rea­son for him to kill the impos­tor, and there was noth­ing at all in the first three acts to sug­gest that kind of flaw. It was, I think, forced on the char­ac­ter by a film­maker who didn’t com­pletely under­stand what he was doing.

Act I has not one spo­ken word. It tells the story of Plainview’s start, and pro­vides impor­tant back­ground infor­ma­tion on his rela­tion­ship with his son. The score is most notice­able dur­ing Act I, too. Much of the score is awful. If you have ever seen the pro­logue to 2001: A Space Odyssey, you have an idea about how Act I felt.

(Aside: An even closer com­par­i­son is to the score to the “The Archi­tect and The Appren­tice” sequence in Matthew Barney’s Cre­mas­ter 3, but this sequence is not avail­able on the com­mer­cially avail­able Cre­mas­ter 3 DVD, and so you’ve prob­a­bly never seen it. The DVD only has the “The Order” sequence. I have the score to Cre­mas­ter 3 on CD, if you want to bor­row it. The part of which I am speak­ing is amelodic, atonal, arhyth­mic, aggres­sive, and alto­gether unpleasant.)

A lot of the score is like that, but some­times it gets some struc­ture and works out really well. The score dur­ing the acci­dent at the well is still amelodic, but it gets a rhyth­mic qual­ity that really dri­ves home the anx­i­ety of the scene. So the score wasn’t all bad, just mostly.

Through­out the film, Plain­view is an athe­ist. He gives credit where credit is due — to the oil men who have the skill to extract great wealth from deep in the ground. Ely Sun­day (the antag­o­nist preacher-​​boy) con­tin­u­ally presses Plain­view to give credit to God. In Act IV, after Plain­view has shot his impos­tor brother, he is black­mailed into allow­ing Ely to bap­tize him into the Church. The rit­ual is purely a vehi­cle for Ely’s revenge, and Plain­view plays along in order to get an ease­ment for his pipeline to cross the land of a hold­out in Ely’s pocket. So Plain­view pro­fesses that he is a sin­ner and aban­doned his son. (This isn’t entirely true. After an acci­dent at the well destroyed his son’s hear­ing, Plain­view puts the boy on a train to San Fran­cisco, to be enrolled in a school for the deaf. The boy loved work­ing with his father, and would have never agreed to be sep­a­rated from him. But Plain­view was doing what was best for the boy, not just get­ting rid of him.) Plain­view has a “rev­e­la­tion” dur­ing the scene and sends for his son to return (now accom­pa­nied by a sign instruc­tor). There is clearly a very strong bond between the two, and Plain­view is set up as truly car­ing for the boy, despite the boy’s true parent­age. Which makes Act V so much more inexplicable.

Act IV is where it starts to go down­hill. We see changes in Plain­view, and flaws that were not in evi­dence for the first three acts. Acts IV and V do not fol­low from the ear­lier acts.

Act V really ruins the film. Plain­view totally self-​​destructs, for no good rea­son. The film seems to sug­gest that he is cor­rupted by his wealth, but hasn’t done any­thing to really make us under­stand how. I guess this is the Social­ism. We are expected to take for granted that wealth cor­rupts and destroys. Plain­view dis­owns his son. Again, for no good rea­son except that the boy, now grown and mar­ried, wants to leave his father’s com­pany and strike out on his own in Mex­ico. After his son leaves, Ely comes back ask­ing for money. Plain­view gets his own revenge for the bap­tism scene by mak­ing Ely pro­fess his own iniq­ui­ties, in much the same way Ely had made Plain­view do. I guess we are sup­posed to think that the two men are really no dif­fer­ent from one another — both par­a­sites and con-​​artists, but those of us who actu­ally watched the first three acts know bet­ter, and the scene comes off as really quite humor­ous. When Plain­view starts chas­ing Ely around the room with deadly intent, the scene is truly com­i­cal. Plain­view blud­geons Ely to death with a bowl­ing pin, and my sis­ter and I were laugh­ing. We weren’t the only ones, either.

It really was a pity, because so much of the film was really good, and Daniel Day-​​Lewis (as Plain­view) gave an excel­lent per­for­mance. The first three acts were quite good and very well-​​told, and are visu­ally and the­mat­i­cally appeal­ing. For these rea­sons, I could not rate it too harshly.