Review: There Will Be Blood
Did you think your song and dance and your superstition would help you, Eli? I am the Third Revelation! I am who the Lord has chosen!
Our culture has always been preoccupied with religion. When I say ‘our culture,’ I mean both American culture and human culture. But I will not attempt to address religion from the standpoint of humanity; our need as a species for spirituality is beyond the scope or point of this review. There Will Be Blood is about the American sort of preoccupation, namely, a capitalistic preoccupation.
Religion in the United States thrives on competition. While we respect our right to worship freely and without government sponsorship, we want people to believe in our personal religions, to accept our beliefs as true. We want them to buy in. So we preach of the glory, redemption, peace, and so on that our religion promises and prophesy the consequences of rejection. By endorsing one religion, we implicitly deny all others. Most often this is not done out of malace. But occasionally there will be disagreement, there will be strife, and there will be blood.
This film presents two competing religions: a sort of fundamentalist evangelical movement, dubbed The Church of the Third Revelation, and an altogether capitalist yet not completely materialist endeavor, otherwise known as oil (or Oil! as Upton Sinclair would have us know it, the title of the novel on which the film is based). Each has a god, the New Testament God of the former and Oil of the latter, and each has its preacher-prophet, Eli Sunday (Paul Dano) and Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis). Like most religions in the United States, they find a way to coexist. There is some tension at first, but gradually a symbiotic relationship takes shape as Plainview’s campaign to convert the Californian town of New Boston to oil-ism, or oil-anity, provides more manpower for spreading the Word According to Eli.
Eli and Plainview are master salesmen but with decidedly different demeanors. As Eli, Dano is charismatic but curiously pubescent. He manages to command great respect among his flock while casting out demons in voice-cracked shrieks. It works against the believability of the film because I cannot see a townsfolk following this young man. Dano has received critical acclaim for his performance, and it is quite good and consistent, but I wonder if it was the right performance for the film. Contrasted against Day-Lewis’s character Plainview, Dano’s Eli is laughable. In one scene where Eli is casting out a woman’s arthritis, I wasn’t sure if I should be laughing at the scratching in Dano’s voice and the straining of his boyish face or if I should be laughing at the total enrapture of his audience.
As I have given it further thought, I favor the latter interpretation. Eli’s character is a salesman, an actor. He’s just not quite as good as Plainview. By the time we meet Eli in the film (even though we’ve already met Dano in the form of Eli’s brother, Paul Sunday), we’ve grown accustomed to Plainview’s own charisma (and Day-Lewis’s stoic presence as well). We see Eli through the eyes of Plainview, a young upstart standing in the path of the True Word, oil-ism. When Plainview and Eli present themselves to their potential believers/customers, it is as if they are acting on a stage. We see that Plainview’s speech is rehearsed and even includes a prop, his ’son,’ just as much as Eli’s sermons are staged in order to push certain tenets and beliefs.
But as in any competition, there are losers, and the film takes it time to show the consequences of unbridled religious fervor. In a world where religious zealots are rapidly tearing society apart, whether that religion revolves around Christ, Mohammed, oil, or bargain clothing, the promise of this film’s title should come as no surprise. We are witnessing the rape of the world, through humanity and nature, by humanity.
The camera work of the film reinforces this sense of loss. Shots tend to linger on the landscape in the fashion of traditional Westerns, but here it does not evoke a sense of wonder and awe. Instead, given the somber mood put forth by the score, slow takes, and sparse cutting, shots of the landscapes call to mind a lamentation, a silent wailing for a loss that is to come. The scenery is dry and barren, not devoid of detail but devoid of life. We are left not to meditate on the opportunity available in such a wide-open land, the freedom of choice and law and future as in other Westerns, but rather we are instructed to brood upon a dying thing as humanity pushes inexorably forward in its zealotry. The exploits of Plainview and Eli are continually set against the backdrop of the land, the silent witness and silent victim of their human competition.
It’s a different sort of Western, but it is a Western, in its atmosphere and its tall-tale story. Perhaps it doesn’t conform to all the conventions of a Western. These aren’t traditional cowboys, and there are no damsels in distress. But Westerns use the landscape to play off of the characters and conflicts. They work directly with the notion of manifest destiny and the myth of our Chosen Nation: the new land (the West or wherever it happens to be) is a clean slate, meant to be colonized and filled with our culture and our beliefs and our dreams. People fight and die for cultures, beliefs, and dreams. But is it worth it?
The film concludes with the line, “I’m finished.” And indeed, the speaker is finished, quite finished. We can only imagine the legal and psychological repercussions he faces. But as Plainview’s son moves out of the tyrannical grip of his father, breaks from the ceaseless, careless march, we receive one of the central questions of this film: must this be the finish? Are we on some inescapable path?
Must there be blood?
