I saw There Will Be Blood with two of the guys I game with every week. They’re some of the best friends I’ve made post-college, and our mutual bond is a love of RPGs. The types of games we play are very much conflict-focused, and our play style has evolved into a hard-hitting groove of near-constant conflict, resolution, and escalation. Watching the movie simply from this standpoint, it was masterful.

Every piece built and built and built. For every action there was a reaction that made the situation harder, or murkier, or more difficult, and through it all we see Daniel Plainview. A man who wants to deny his humanity, and is aided in this by those around him, and the power of the money he pulls from the ground. For a movie as long as There Will Be Blood there was remarkably little waste. Even the pauses added to the tension.

I like that level of engagement in a movie, that constant, “Oh no,” feeling. The Wages of Fear is one of my favorite movies for exactly this reason. I’m riding along with the characters, completely absorbed in their deeds and their place.

That said, I don’t believe I absorbed all of the movie in my first sitting. It seems like the sort of thing that will bloom and bloom on multiple viewings.

The entire arc of father-son, father-brother, and back to father-son relationships seems like one of the supporting structures of the movie, but I feel like I didn’t ‘get’ everything that made the HW-Daniel-Henry triangle so potent. It certainly drove Daniel to the state we see him in at the end of the film, shooting at china plates in a giant empty house. When he tells HW he’s “No better than a bastard,” it was repeated not for HW’s understanding, but for Daniel’s.

Also, the feel of modernity inherent in the movie seems essential. The ties TWBB makes to modern intentions and events seems obvious now, but I never felt like it clubbed me over the head. The film simply showed me a story, and allowed me to draw my own connections.

In that way TWBB is a superior film to No Country for Old Men, another movie amongst those I loved in the last few months. No Country also revolves around the cycle of violence and corruption that money can create, and comes to the conclusion that it has always been thus, connecting the modern cycle to an older tradition. TWBB does the opposite, simply showing the older cycle, and daring us to compare it to our world as it stands now. That’s gutsy and difficult filmmaking, and that There Will Be Blood manages to be a ripping narrative whilst fulfilling this role is a testament to the quality of the film.

That was rambly, and there’s more in there, but I hope that makes it a little clearer why I have such a great amount of respect for There Will Be Blood. (and I haven’t even talked about the costuming, direction, cinematography, or other technical aspects!)

I felt similarly, Nate. The “undeniable excellence” you mention (and a similar quality in No Country for Old Men, which I enjoyed more) is why I added the word “virtuosity” to my questioning post.

Paul Thomas Anderson tends to make such deliberate and forceful gestures toward artfulness that he can at times appear profound and at times cloying and pretentious, perhaps depending to some extent upon one’s own disposition and mood. I have found that thoughtful people sometimes disagree vehemently about his movies (perhaps none moreso than Magnolia), and maybe this is why. I can usually go either way on any of them, which is why he’s a director whose movies I try never to miss, but also one for whom I have no special fondness.

I can stomach a few heavy-handed metaphors, and I don’t demand realism either, but I do have a fairly delicate tolerance for allegory, and there were times watching this movie when I became a little wary of a simple capitalism vs. religion (or nature vs. revelation) setup. On the whole, though, it seems much bigger and vastly more complex than that. The naming seems at once obvious and oblique: Plainview, the Sundays (Paul, Eli, Abel). I don’t think that’s from the Sinclair book, and randomness like that seems improbable.

The vastness and desolateness and isolation of the West felt to me binding and claustrophobic (maybe contributing to the “tenseness” you mention), like it does it Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man, and unlike basically every Western ever, and the actual West, for me. In this respect it is almost as reminiscent of outer space in an Alien movie as it is of the West.

There’s surely something to all this father/brother/son business, but I don’t have they key either. It’s a movie I want to watch again, but not right away.