But didn't you hate the ending?"
Whenever "There Will Be Blood" comes up, this is where the conversation inevitably hits the wall. My wife and I were at a dinner party the other week, and as is often the case when there's a movie critic present - movies being one subject on which everybody has a reasonably safe opinion - the topic turned to new films and Oscar nominees.
Up and down the long banquet table, I could see good, intelligent people wrestling with the Gordian knot of director Paul Thomas Anderson's contrarian epic, expressions of rapture, mystification, and distaste flickering in the candlelight. Sure, the movie is good for you, but is it any good? And what does it mean that a work this unsettlingly strange is up for so many major awards? Has the cultural ground shifted beneath our feet?
Perhaps; in any event, the unease is understandable. (Warning: plot spoilers discussed below.) "There Will Be Blood" is cryptic and forbidding. Jonny Greenwood's lunar-landscape strings scrape away on the soundtrack while Daniel Day-Lewis's oil baron, Daniel Plainview, strides through the California desert like a psychotic biblical patriarch. At times, Anderson seems to be speaking in a whole new movie language, one of harsh alien beauties. And there's that ending - an unexpected spasm that fulfills the title while seeming to thumb its nose at the audience in contempt.
Ah, yes, the audience. Most movies, even the "difficult" art-house ones, rush to curry favor with us. By contrast, "There Will Be Blood" keeps its distance. Anderson is so fiercely involved with his tale - with the arid glories of the setting, the cavernous hatreds of the hero - that he doesn't really need an audience. In a popular culture where we're groveled to on a daily basis, this is a shock, but it's not an insurmountable one. (In other words, you should probably get over it.)
Ultimately, the film stands revealed as a paradox: a two-hour-and-forty-minute character study with little happening in the way of conventional narrative. There are ravishing sequences - the oil-well fire is brilliant cinema - and scenes of quiet grandeur, but mostly we watch as Plainview builds a California oil empire and rots from within over the course of 30-odd years.
The genre is American Pessimism, then - a well-established school. The national dream of individual striving, betterment, and prosperity has been turned upside down and shaken many times before: Literature has its Gatsby, television has its Tony Soprano, the movies have their Citizens Kane and Corleone. (Real life has Howard Hughes.)
Against the insistence upon success that is our foundation myth, such works say all is entropy; the profit center cannot hold. In "Blood," it's only Plainview's will that holds Plainview's world together, at the cost of his soul. He doesn't seem terribly attached to that, anyway.
One rap against the movie by those expecting to be led by the delicate hand of character development is that Plainview doesn't evolve. No, but he does intensify. A loner at the start, with a son (Dylan Freasier) he acquires because the child's dead father worked for him, the oilman puts on a sociable mask only so he can talk landowners out of their acres. He's willing to use the child, H.W., as evidence of a family bond that doesn't exist - wooing and winning an actual woman is clearly of no interest - and, in some of the film's most inspired scenes, he uses an evangelical preacher (Paul Dano) to win over local hearts and minds.
And yet, for most of "There Will Be Blood," there is a human being somewhere in there, capable of being touched by the concept of family. Plainview clearly loves his boy and only draws away in the aftermath of the accident that renders H.W. deaf: Businessmen have little use for broken vessels. The crisis, though, comes with the scene in which Plainview understands that the man who claims to be his long-lost brother (Kevin J. O'Connor) is a fraud.
I didn't catch this moment the first time, but in a second viewing it's frighteningly clear: Plainview's Rubicon, and he never crosses back. He and the brother, Henry, have reached the sea after surveying the route of the pipeline that will make the oilman's great fortune. The goal is within Daniel's grasp. He finally confides his dark secret to the man he believes is his sole family member.
"I have a competition in me," Plainview says in the campfire scene that's the movie's fulcrum. "I want no one else to succeed. . . . I want to earn enough money that I can get away from everyone." He pauses, then says to Henry, "To have you here gives me a second breath. I can't keep doing this on my own with these . . . people." It's as close to a declaration of love as he ever gets.
The next day, he's betrayed. As the two men sit panting after a swim in the Pacific - a baptism more cleansing than the one Plainview receives later in the film - he drops an obscure reference to an event back in their Midwest hometown. Henry replies with diplomatic terseness, and in that nanosecond Plainview sees it all: That the brother is a fake, that Daniel can and will trust no one, ever again. Day-Lewis deserves an award for those few frames of film alone.
The other great subject of "There Will Be Blood" is the relationship between capital and religion, the twin engines of American history. Anderson presents this as an eternal wrestling match in which the contestants vie for power while pretending every so often to be on the same side. (As always, we're the suckers in the pews.)
The preacher has his triumphs - the scene in which Plainview's pretended conversion to Christianity suddenly hits a vein of messy, agonized truth - but ultimately it's no contest. Only the leanest survive the Darwinian contest that is American public life, and even a hypocritical conscience is dead weight. The film promises blood and, in the end, delivers it, just as our love affair with oil itself has turned sanguine in recent years. In the bargain, Anderson delivers a way of telling stories on film - indeed, a way of seeing the world - that feels both freshly observed and rooted in primal images of ourselves and our country. That's an accomplishment worth more than any number of Oscars "Blood" may gather.
But: The ending. It's more of a coda, really, in which Anderson revisits the movie's themes in a blunter, more allegorical light. In a novel, this would be understood as a bit of formal playfulness, a way to round off the work with a mischievous kick in the pants. (And make no mistake, the final scene is comedy, complete with a demented speech comparing geology to milkshakes that Anderson lifted from congressional transcripts of the Teapot Dome hearings in the 1920s.)
What some of my dinner-party companions might have accepted in a book, though, they rejected on a screen. "There Will Be Blood" commits the cardinal sin of breaking its narrative spell and announcing, along with its hero, that it's finished, done, over - go home already. Movies are supposed to ease us back into reality, but this one shoves us, much as Daniel Plainview might. No wonder people hate it: It refuses to soften the blow. It's a cold, hard world, this ending says. Now go and make your way in it.
If you're smart, you'll bring a bowling pin.
Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com. For more on movies, go to boston.com/ae/movies/blog.
