There Will Be Blood finally arrived in the wilds of Scotland.  What an
interesting film.

Not so much the Malick-fest that I was led to believe it would be.
PTA shares none of Malick's concerns for nature and technology and how
the two are potentially at odds with each other; in fact, PTA seems
almost to go against Malick's (apparently Heideggerian) conception of
the world and the role of humans within it (not many whimsical shots
of grass blowing in wind, for example) and never at any point seems to
question the 'unnatural' drive to plunder the land.

For Anderson, it seems that this murderous drive simply exists and, as
such, it is perhaps natural that humans have this black stuff that
comes to the surface (whereas Malick seems to think that humans are at
odds with nature).

The use of music suggested that Anderson has been watching Carlos
Reygadas of late.  I did not stay to see composers, but it definitely
smacked of the latter's predilection for the likes of Golijov and John
Tavener, with maybe some Philip Glass and Hans Zimmer thrown in (the
use of music sounding like Zimmer's perhaps being about as close as
PTA does come to Malick here).

But while Reygadas goes in for redemption (witness Silent Light), PTA,
himself normally one to approve of redemption (witness everything
prior to this), here utterly rejects redemption, giving this the feel
of something by Herzog (Kinski films) and/or, oddly enough, of Harmony
Korine (julien donkey-boy) - as well as the obligatory nods to
McTeague-Stroheim.

I thought to riff about an Upton Sinclair-Eisenstein-PTA triangle, but
what really struck me about the film was its becoming an exercise in
self-destruction - not just for Day Lewis, but for Anderson as well.

SPOILER: the final scene is so hammed up - and evidently deliberately
so given that PTA gently tracks Day Lewis back and forth along the
bowling alley in which the scene takes place - suggesting that the
whole performance was blocked to an extent...  But this hamming seems
to bring about the destruction of the whole film in a way that strikes
me as fitting; PTA builds his own monument and then destroys it...

PTA is Eli: the boy wonder, the false prophet.  Eli is forced to admit
that his earlier messages of redemption are false, and that the rain
of frogs in Magnolia was simply superstition.  "Eli" as he has been
constructed is nothing, and in place of Eli we will have Paul - Paul
Dano, Paul Thomas Anderson and Paul the character played by Paul Dano.
 The Paul who did sell out, the Paul who should have sold out, owning
a modest but successful business, instead of insistently trying to
access some transcendental truth that all know to be an illusion.

And the instrument of Eli's death and Paul's rebirth-in-absence?
Daniel Plainview/Day Lewis, the man who, lame and bearded (reminiscent
of Christy Brown?) drags himself terribly from his buried position
underground and wreaks a revenge more terrible than any previously
imagined by Eli/PTA in his pathetic attempts to convince people of the
world's inherent goodness.  The Day Lewis of Bill 'The Butcher'
Cutting, who, as PTA's imagined version of Scorsese's mouthpiece tells
Eli/PTA that he will never be in the league of Scorsese, and who kills
him, telling him that the real Paul should have sold out.  PTA, who
wanted the blessing of the father, forever the reject of the Academy,
the man who should have just made films like his homonym Paul WS
Anderson and never bothered to strive for greatness since you either
have it or you don't and Eli does not have it, and Eli should just
have stuck true to himself and remained Paul.

Daniel ceases to be Plainview in that final scene and emerges as Day
Lewis - the whole film collapsing in that one scene.

A genius study about the frustration of being a genius that
perennially doubts his own genius; that exorcises itself of all of the
filth, maybe the revenge of nature (DDL) on human self-creation (PTA)
(hence the need to transcend being Daniel Playview and to come to the
last as Daniel Day Lewis; for Eli to die and for Paul to be left
off-screen, PTA's career as a great filmmaker obliterated, to be
followed only by mediocrity, exhausted)...

What a fascinating film.

w

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