An epic portrait of American madness and civilization can only end one way.
Robert Altman, may he rest in sardonic peace, died before he could see ace protégé Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood. As someone who made a career out of interrogating all that “America” held holy, I suspect he would have liked it. In one sweeping, phenomenal cinematic blow, Anderson flattens both America’s oil lust and smug piety. But oh, some might say, what about the ending? Well, let’s see. As the purveyor of such sublimely cheeky (and bleak) conclusions as Elliott Gould’s Philip Marlowe departing a killing to the strains of “Hooray for Hollywood” in The Long Goodbye, and Nashville’s post-assassination sing-along to “It Don’t Worry Me,” I daresay he would have been a fan. When the entire system is crazy, only craziness will result. Just ask Hawkeye and Trapper John.
2007 has the fine distinction of producing two movies with jaw-dropping endings that are still logical, and, thank the celluloid gods, not based on some fake-clever twist (he’s been dead all along! it’s all a dream! he’s been dead and it’s a dream!). I’ve already said my piece about No Country for Old Men’s superb deconstruction of viewer expectations. Given the wide-spread disdain for There Will Be Blood’s final 20 minutes—even among critics who liked the film—mounting a defense for it may seem like madness. But hey, isn’t madness what it’s all about? Yes, the final section of the film is over the top. It’s akin to a grotesquely brutal Keystone Kops slapstick. And yes, it’s just plain weird. But its weirdness is as pedigreed as it is expressive. Some critics have done the film a disservice by evoking the most sacred of sacred cinematic cows, Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane as a comparison. More than one patron leaving the theater could be heard sniffing that Blood was no Kane, and Anderson, correspondingly, was no Welles. But if we’re going to go there with Welles (and cinephile Anderson certainly does), I’d have to say the ending owes as much to Touch of Evil’s atmosphere of twisted, dissolute frontier violence as it does to Charles Foster Kane’s desolate, self-inflicted isolation in his cavernous mansion. Daniel Day-Lewis’s monstrous entrepreneur Daniel Plainview is nothing less than a thin Hank Quinlan sitting in Xanadu, contemplating his non-existent future in a world over which he’s lost control.
Whereas Evil’s corrupt lawman Quinlan’s frontier rainmaking domain was the Mexican border in Texas, Daniel’s is the literal end of the west in California’s oil fields. Unlike Quinlan (and Kane), however, Daniel is a figure of almost entirely pure, unadulterated capitalism. He has no wife, no girlfriend, no Marlene Dietrich as a wise hooker to tweak him about his drives. He never utters one whit of desire for a female counterpart, either. His libidinal passions are all wrapped up in his oil wells (yeah, phallic oil derricks, lots of pumping, pumping, pumping until they become gushers, etc. etc.). This is not a good thing. Indeed, it retroactively becomes yet another symptom of his insanity. For when Daniel claws his way out of his 1898 mine and to the claim office in the opening sequence of the film, it’s pretty clear that while he may now possess a big hunk of silver, he does not possess all his marbles. Cinematographer Robert Elswit’s spectacular vista of the hills containing said mine combined with the first dissonant wail of Jonny Greenwood’s appropriately unsettling score merely punctuate the tonal point (note to Terrence Malick: hire Greenwood for your next film. Please). Nothing good can come of this level of obsession. The blunt title card with the olde style lettering is merely a promise/announcement of how it will all end.
Minus the ending, though, what follows Daniel’s first oil strike in 1902 possibly could be mistaken for a merely dark story of one man’s triumphant rise to become California’s pre-eminent oil kingpin. Oh sure, he may risk losing whatever shred exists of his soul, but even that threatens to be redeemed by the end of the 1911-12 section that makes up the bulk of the film. For as with any artfully charismatic movie psychopath, Daniel has one supposed soft spot: his adopted son H.W. Even though you get the feeling that Daniel never loses sight of the fact that H.W. would be good business (he’s a “family man” as well as an “oil man”), Day-Lewis lets us catch a glimpse of real anguish when H.W. is seriously injured. That speaks even louder than his cold rage at the oil competitors who dare to tell him how to take care of his family. Just as evocative is the extraordinary showdown between Daniel and his Bible-thumping nemesis Eli Sunday when godless Daniel is forced to accept a baptism in order to get his precious oil pipeline to the Pacific. Daniel responds to Eli’s hellfire-and-brimstone preaching style with resistance and caustic emoting (his request for the blood of Christ is hilarious)—except when Eli mentions the banished H.W. Then Daniel’s act drops for a split second to show a glimmer of pain before modulating into a mocking fervor that’s fuelled by anger at Eli’s low blow. Daniel gets his fortune-making pipeline, and he retrieves his son, while Eli leaves town to become an itinerant preacher. At long last, Daniel has everything he wants. And H.W.’s constant companion becomes Eli’s little sister Mary, suggesting that the Plainviews could become a dynasty…
Seems like a logical ending, doesn’t it? This is where a lot of viewers probably thought the movie should have ended, if only so they could hit the bathroom. Maybe with the 1927 scene of H.W. and Mary’s wedding and a single shot of Daniel’s enormous mansion as a coda. Not even the Depression can bring him down. But as anyone familiar with Chinatown and John Huston’s utterly depraved water baron Noah Cross knows, this simply cannot hold. Hey, Daniel Day-Lewis isn’t striding around channeling Huston’s distinctively guttural, stentorian inflections just because it sounds cool. And as with Cross, it’s the adult child who brings out the beast in the tycoon man. Yes, Anderson shows us how oil fills the black hole where Daniel’s heart and/or soul should be, as Daniel—covered in the dark, crude goo—watches his well go up in flames during an inky, moonless night. But it’s only when the fanatical tycoon is finally shut up in a house that we see the extent of his psychological damage.
Indeed, this shift in venue is vital for making sense of the end. We’ve never seen Daniel completely enclosed in these kinds of ornate, wealthy surroundings. He’s always been either in a mine, in an oil field, making a play for someone else’s property, or ever so briefly in the small shack where he slept and the roughly built church where Eli preached. He’s been in process, outdoors, claiming the final frontier. Now he owns everything. He has nothing left to carve out and conquer. A mansion is not his natural habitat, and so he amuses himself by shooting his rifle at a stuffed buffalo head—when he’s not getting snockered in an indoor bowling alley one suspects has never been used. The monomaniacal energy for empire building, and the hatred he feels for just about everyone on earth, have nowhere “productive” to go. And when that kind of inner sewage builds up, well, think of what happens with that flaming oil geyser. Yep, it explodes over the top. His first confrontation with the adult H.W. reveals how any affection he may have felt for his son has been curdled by his circumstances. Daniel is a man who has become accustomed to having his way and getting whatever he wants. He’s also deeply invested in how his personal father-son myth is as key to his identity as his business. H.W. getting married and leaving Daniel’s company is a double betrayal. He puts his wife, a Sunday, first, and dares to become the competition. Daniel lashes out accordingly. That he doesn’t inflict violence on H.W. is, perhaps, just plain luck.
Eli, of course, isn’t so lucky. Kudos to Paul Dano for both holding his own against Day-Lewis, and making Eli such a baby-faced and believable snake in the grass (and snake oil salesman, I suppose). When he shows up in Daniel’s bowling alley, you just know this isn’t going to end well. Daniel’s been primed: he’s been waiting (and wanting) to crush Eli for years. He’s also lost his hope for a family man tycoon legacy with H.W. He’s pissed (in all senses of the slang term). And anyone who gets his jollies by firing his shotgun inside his house isn’t going to respond with rationality and self-control when he finally gets his chance to take out all of that pickled rage on Eli. Daniel plays it straight at first, stringing along Eli in a manner that recalls their baptism face-off. Once again, he gets his last financial laugh. This time, however, there is nothing and no one to hold him back like the first time Daniel shoved Eli in the mud years earlier when he asked for money. No bystanders to grab him. No son he must consider. No business to build. No community to woo. No “civilization” he must abide. Needless to say, he goes absolutely off-the-rails, head-over-heels, batshit crazy. And what better way to viscerally convey madness than with a jarringly lunatic ending featuring a truly horrifying murder with a bowling pin? The bizarreness of Daniel and Eli’s fight in the indoor bowling alley becomes a metaphor for Daniel’s cracked psyche, complete with his deceptively simple response when his unflappable butler comes to check on him. For all the damage and exploitation his fanatical drive for success has engineered, Daniel Plainview does not deserve anything resembling a triumphant or happy ending. An oil man who thinks he’s a family man is actually a crazy man. And we all know very, very well what can happen when a crazy oil man gets too much power. At least this one knows that his future is now all used up.
Guy Movies is a biweekly analysis of machismo cinema from the perspective of a woman.
