There Will Be Blood: Oil, oil, trouble and toil.

Random thoughts as I try to get a grip on this one...

About halfway through There Will Be Blood a light bulb went on over my head - ah hah, like an opera. This is an opera. From that point on, whatever craziness was laid upon me by the inspired and deranged head (just like his main character) of PT Anderson just slid on by with mild amusement and appreciation. That way, things clicked. Daniel Day Lewis is tremendous here, as always, he makes every scene his own, but he also goes over the top in primal fashion; such as a scene where he's forced to be baptized, which he turns into a comic moment, where it could have been played quieter, more pathetically. But again, this fits with the operatic style here.  Even the much-talked about bizarro third act works - well, almost works - when looked at this way. There's a grand guignol-ishness at play. Forget Sweeney Todd: There Will Be Blood is the dark comedy horror opera people need to see.

And in addition to being operatic, it plays with sound and silence so much (with Daniel Plainview's adopted son losing his hearing in an oil derrick accident the centerpiece of that and the driving event that causes everything that teeters off afterwards) that it's also hard not to think of parts of it as a silent film - the expressive acting, and faces, gesturing reminded me of early films (films that would have been made in the era in which the film is set). The first twenty minutes or so are particularly brilliant in that sense, all wordless, the events that lead to Plainview's success as an oil man. I want to see the film again just to see that sequence again.  And at times it works best as a black comedy, too.  But Anderson does what he's done in previous films, except here it happens later into the story - he reminds you that this is a film and these are characters, that he is the puppetmaster above - and sometimes, because of that, he loses control of his creations a bit.

And along those lines, as notably different as There Will Be Blood is from Anderson's previous works in many respects, it does share his consistent propensity for impressive beginnings, and muddled endings. Each film has lost steam, unable to connect all the many ambitious dots he's laid out (Hard Eight, the simplest of his films, probably works the most consistently).  And at the very end, which takes place many years after the majority of the story does, it's hard to buy Paul Dano, as well-cast as he is as the young preacher, in that scene, hard to see him as nearly 20 years older, hard for him to match Day Lewis; he doesn't quite seem sure what to do.

It's hard to knock Anderson's ambition.  The film captures the atmosphere of the turn of the century West, the expanses, the arid terrain, the weathered people, so strikingly well. It's also one of the best films I've ever seen about the two devils that sit on the shoulders of many Americans, capitalism and religion and here both of them - in their worst forms, granted - are shown as equally to blame for much of what ails us. Both have at their cores a fundamental (excuse the expression) dishonesty, and in the end, here, capitalism wins, but only superficially.

The film builds like an underground oil deposit, bubbling over the surface in drips at first, then more, then a geyser, then explosions. It doesn't always work logically, it's often discomfiting, but it's certainly unforgettable, it demands discussion afterwards, and for that I'd rather there be twenty such films than any one P.S. I Love You.

Grade: A-.

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