The Surprising Absence of a Message in There Will Be Blood

If I told you that we were going to watch a movie in this day and age when John D. Rockafellar is treated like Satan Incarnate and oil is now the official three letter dirty word, about a late 19th early 20th century oil baron who goes head to head against an evangelical preacher, I can imagine the first three things that would come to mind. The last, beneath the notion that it's a movie about space aliens riding giant ponies hellbent on impregnating our stuffed animals, thing that will occur to you is that it is neither about capitalism nor religion.

Yes, you are reading correctly, in this politically charged climate of oil-intolerance and increased Marxian apology, a movie based on Upton Sinclair's Oil! is in no way a politically charged film intent upon challenging either capitalism or Christianity, even though it deals with that precious black gold and a Western preacher by the name of Eli. Throw into the mix that the oil baron protagonist of our film is an atheist, and I'm sure you'll have insisted that I must be lying at this point, but I tell you the truth when I explain that the director understood that the underlying themes of this film were far too precious, far too vast, to let it become occluded by something as trivial as the early 21st century's appraisal of oil barons, big business, or the capitalist-communist battle that rages in universities across the United States.

It may seem excessive, going on about how the film isn't about religion or capitalism, but one of the key things to understanding this movie is realizing more than what it is, in what it isn't. Of course, before I can tell you anything about what the film is, I must prelude any review with the fact that the film is simply magnificent. It's an epic film that finds itself alone in a time of epic films. Today, epic means Kingdom of Heaven, Gladiator, or any other movie that decides that the natural sky has no place on the big screen and digitally reanimates it. But this is a story in the truly classical sense of the word epic, the scope is simply so large, the matters so big, that they aren't the stuff of a twelve year old's story outline that they present to their English teacher.

There Will Be Blood is a movie that understands exactly what the film is, and that is not a message. Don't mistake the title to think that the absence of a message is a negative thing, as it is simply a full-scope tale of a man who, believe it or not, actually lives the American dream. Setting out to the Wild West in the dying days of prospectors and cowboys, when the automobile is on the verge of replacing the horse, only years before the world is turned upside down by World War I but just as many years since Wyatt Earp cleaned up the West, there is a simple man armed with a simple pick trying to find his fortune. He frantically searches for silver, or gold, or something to justify the fact that his past several months of living have been in a shoddy tent, and his only companions have been dark, muddy walls on either side of him.

Then, to his surprise, he finds that his little plot of land is not a silver mine, but is something eminently more useful: the entire thing is spitting out oil. He later sells the land, and turns this into an enterprising, lucrative business whereby he would go across the state of California, set up oil drills, and then sell the new profitable piece of real estate between Standard Oil and Union Oil. The man who starts with not but his pick ends with a mansion - but the way in which he gets there encompasses a tale that lasts decades (which is told sometimes in mere minutes).

Some have complained that the story is sometimes slow to move, and in a way this is true. The plot in no way feels the need to speed itself up for the sake of the audience, but then, you're not the audience while watching this movie in the same way you're the audience of any other movie. The sets are so believable, the lighting so authentic, the costumes so well worn and faded, the props so thoroughly dusted by the years of use, that you are indeed watching a tale unfold in front of you, but not necessarily from the theater lounge chairs. Instead, you're sitting in Eli's church, watching as Daniel Plainview and Eli Sunday squabble. Therefore, when the plot will seemingly meander, with wide camera angles that track every step Daniel Plainview takes rather than simply skipping to the next available plot point, and tracking seemingly every detail of the man's life from 1892 to 1927.

But there's so much that this story has to tell - and the greatest surprise to me is that it was all about the characters of Plainview and Sunday. Though their contexts are religion and business, they do not try to speak of a kind of all encompassing overtone of their specific trades, but rather they bitter over seemingly universal values, as they finally come to agreement over one thing: they'll both do what they can to get ahead, only one of them devotes themselves to a presumably higher cause that he cannot understand, and when this higher cause does not yield him the financial rewards he both expects and demands, he casts it aside.

The film is brilliant, but all the same it is not for everyone. It's not even for those who truly enjoy movies and often get the more subtle points of them, as I predict the complexities of the characters' motives will degenerate into some sort of political philandering and arguing, which would fundamentally do this masterpiece of cinema a horrible injustice.

Naturally I recommend There Will Be Blood to anyone who enjoys deep, classically treated cinema, but if you're expecting an in-depth, left leaning criticism of oil dependency, atheist diatribes, and anti-capitalist apologetics, you will be sadly mistaken. This is a story of a man who is hellbent on success - and ultimately, it is a cautionary tale, as we learn that Daniel Plainview has one certainty in his life. We know beyond all shadow of a doubt that he truly loves his adopted son, he makes this clear in a bevy of scenes. However, as he admits to another key character in the film, he hates when others are successful, and by the end of the film, we learn that this contempt for others' success actually exceeds the love for his son.

And meanwhile, we learn that the ever passionately evangelical Eli loves success more than something he claims he loves above all else - so in the end, both men fundamentally sacrifice that which is their most important so that they can satiate their greed.

It is almost Greek in its irony and universal character destruction.