I Am Not Convinced That P. T. Anderson Is a Great Director

Okay, all my friends want me to write about my problems with There Will Be Blood, even though I haven't formed my ideas carefully. There will definitely be spoilers.

More than an hour into There Will Be Blood, I was still waiting for the movie to break, for Anderson to show us what he was interested in. Then came the big scene where the oil gusher that Plainview had been chasing all his life comes in, damaging his derrick and seriously injuring his adoptive son H. W. (Anderson uses a subjective effect to show that H. W. has been deafened by the accident. Part of me sniffed suspiciously at the point-of-view effect, given how outside of all the characters we had been up to this point. But I gave Anderson a pass on this, because it was such an economical way of conveying information to us. Not all good directors are style purists.)

The event immediately sets up a conflict that is presented clearly: Plainview seems to care about his son, and puts himself at risk to haul the boy away from the accident site; but he is also crucially interested in the gusher, the key event of his business life. The deafened H. W. clings to his father in panic as Plainview pulls himself away to tend to a fire at the derrick; the scene is painful to watch, but effective and plausible.

Following an admirable scene in which the oil fire is snuffed out by dynamite in a single sustained long shot, Plainview and his assistant crouch by the gusher. The assistant makes a grim comment about the day's events, and Plainview says something like, "Cheer up! This is what we've been waiting for! We just became millionaires." The assistant asks whether H. W. is okay. Plainview stoically replies, "No, he's not okay" - he shows regret, but in a modest quantity, not the kind of regret that a man with a seriously injured son shows. And Plainview continues to contemplate the gusher - he had not forgotten about H. W., and the assistant's remark did not remind him to return to the panicking boy's side.

This behavior is not comprehensible to us at this point in the film. It will become comprehensible much later, when we discover that Plainview sees H. W. as an advertising aid for his business rather than as a son, and cares little for him. In retrospect, Plainview's occasional nurturing gestures toward the boy register as a bit of vestigial good will in the man's nature, good will that he does not value highly or factor into his life decisions. This works for me.

But Anderson does little or nothing to orient us to the mystery of Plainview's reaction. A director concerned with narrative clarity might have used the assistant, the only possible audience identification figure in the vicinity, to certify that the mystery is in fact a mystery (and not a filmmaking error), perhaps by giving the man a shot of his own as he reacts to what would surely seem like inhuman callousness to him. Even if we knew at this point that Plainview does not care much about H. W., there would still be questions in our mind about how much Plainview is blowing his cover, forgetting to pretend to be a normal human being; and about whether the assistant is surprised by the revelation of Plainview's inhumanity, or used to it, or in sympathy with it.

Anderson seems not to be thinking at all about positioning the audience relative to these mysteries. My reaction was confusion.

I see this as a pattern in Anderson's work, not an isolated case. Consider the subsequent scene in which the preacher Eli Sunday confronts Plainview in public, asking for the money Plainview owes to his church. Plainview surprises the audience by physically attacking the preacher, accusing him of not having exerted his healing powers on H. W.'s behalf. Many questions are raised by this action. Will Plainview be accountable for this public violence, or is he now above the law? The nature of his defrauding the church is unclear: does the church have legal recourse? Do the spectators accept Plainview's power to beat whomever he pleases? If so, are they content with their passivity? Again, Anderson makes no effort to create a context: Sunday's public humiliation (the give and take of humiliation comes to be the film's narrative currency) is presented as spectacle.

A third example: now secure in his power, Plainview discovers that his alleged half-brother Henry is an imposter, executes him, buries him, and falls asleep by the grave. In the morning, he is awakened by Bandy, a landowner who seems to be a devout member of Sunday's church. Near the end of their conversation, Bandy hands Plainview's gun back to him: the implication is that Bandy knows that Plainview just murdered Henry. Is Plainview in any danger of arrest and conviction? Is Bandy unconcerned with the murder, despite his religious bent? These are not questions about character nuance: they are central to the narrative legibility of the scene. Anderson neither answers the questions nor makes it clear that he prefers mystery.

As I gradually realized that Anderson did not intend to manage my emotional relationship with the narrative, I began to withdraw from the film.

Though Anderson's style seems a bit recessive in the first hour of There Will Be Blood, he ultimately grabs hold of the material in a big way. The antipathy between Plainview and Sunday becomes a duel, and Anderson imposes the shape of this duel on the story, transforming what might have been an epic social drama into a rather playful Tom-and-Jerry, Roadrunner-Wile E. Coyote running conflict. As in Magnolia, Anderson shows a fondness for big, explosive, actor-centered climaxes, which begin to flow freely in the film's second half. Psychological plausibility starts to seem beside the point. When Eli Sunday insults and humiliates his father at the dinner table, there is an echo of the mysterious humiliation of Roger Wade at the hands of the diminutive Dr. Verringer in Altman's The Long Goodbye; but Anderson launches Sunday at his father across the dining-room table at mealtime, seemingly for the effect alone. Plainview's "conversion" in Sunday's church is full of actor's moments that rupture the diegesis. Anderson has stopped caring about grading these big scenes to preserve the illusion of real social interaction.

Plainview ensconced in his Xanadu in the final movement, swilling alcohol like Gatorade, seems a concept left over from a more classical conception of the character as a tragic hero. If we take these cues, the film's ending will have something of the incongruousness of Macbeth killing Macduff, then announcing, "I'm finished." But, in place of the social epic, in place of the tragedy, Anderson has constructed a simpler shadow movie, one pitting a charismatic and powerful evil figure against a slimy and unattractive one, and paying off with the satisfaction of victory and a rather campy pleasure in excess.