Even still, those shortcomings do not take away from the film’s many transcendent passages. The opening sixteen minutes, for instance, which pass without a word of dialogue, still manage to be as compelling as anything Anderson has yet put to film. The stellar acting of Daniel Day-Lewis and the evocative score by Jonny Greenwood bring the sequence alive and communicate very clearly what kind of man this Daniel Plainview is and what kind of world he inhabits. And when he finally does open his mouth to speak (before a largely unseen roomful of people), Anderson isolates Plainview so completely that he might as well be talking straight to the audience watching in the theater. This is Anderson announcing, for good or ill, that this is the Daniel Plainview story.
But a strange thing happens along the way to telling the story of Daniel Plainview. He goes completely batshit insane. On first viewing, I thought I might have missed something. The film arrived at that violent, horrifying, astonishing ending and I sat up in my chair and thought, “Shit, when did this happen?” I thought I had fundamentally misread this character. I never saw him as a complete monster. Even after the scene that precedes the ending in which he tells his adopted son H.W. that he was an orphan and a “bastard from a basket.” Even then I thought, obviously, that he was an asshole, but I never saw that ending coming. And so I watched the film again with the intention of keeping always in mind that Daniel was a terrible person, the devil incarnate, a man with nothing but darkness in his heart. That way, I thought, if I could see that strain of mad rage in him throughout the film, then his giving in so completely to madness and violence would at least make sense.
But as I watched the film, I saw no evidence of that rage or that insanity in any of the earlier scenes. Plainview would certainly do or say anything to anyone if it served his interests but he never pushed things beyond reason and his actions always seemed logical. And so, when that ending came once again, I was faced with one of two possibilities. The first was that Daniel Plainview had gone completely insane in the fifteen years that had elapsed off screen. And the second was that he had finally earned enough money that he was no longer tethered to society’s ideas of morality and could say or do anything he damn well pleased.
Obviously the first conclusion is easy and boring (and hopefully not what Anderson intended) so I’ll just focus on the second. There’s an old quote, repeated in Overnight, that goes something like, “Money is truth serum. It doesn’t change you, it just reveals the true you to the world.” In the case of Daniel Plainview, there is ample evidence that he hates most people. He even says so to the man he thinks is his brother Henry. And so it makes sense that, once he became rich enough, he would seclude himself on a massive estate and do or say whatever hurtful thing he felt like to whomever he felt like.
But there are a couple of problems with this theory. The first is that there is also ample evidence that despite what Plainview says, he doesn’t really hate everyone and even has something of a desire to be liked by a select few. Prior to the violent outburst that closes the film, Plainview has a few other moments where he loses control of himself and his temper. The first is when Eli Sunday asks for the $5000 that Daniel owes to his church, whereupon Daniel slaps Eli around and rubs his face in the mud. The second is when the Standard Oil man offers to buy him out and he threatens to break into the man’s home and slit his throat. Both of these incidents, while seemingly evidence of Plainview’s mental instability, are precipitated by something that happens to his adopted son H.W. When Plainview shoves Eli in the mud, it is right after his son loses his hearing. And when he threatens to kill the Standard Oil man, it is only after he mentions something about H.W. that Daniel takes offense to. Both of those incidents would seem to indicate that Plainview cares about his son. And if that’s true, the idea that he’s a complete misanthrope no longer makes sense. So maybe the ending of the film isn’t so much Plainview finally expressing his true self or even his deep misanthropy but rather simply a man wanting very badly to hurt someone physically as much as he has been hurt emotionally.
Or maybe it isn’t. Maybe it’s something else entirely. The point is, I’ve spent a couple hundred words talking about it and so haven’t had time to focus on the rest of the film. And that, I think, might be the real point because the rest of the film just isn’t that deep. The two hours that come between that bravura opening and that bewildering ending are, despite their laggard pace and meandering discussions of purpose, not all that profound. And I think Anderson knows it. Being the self-aware artist that he is, I think he knew that the dialogue-less opening and the shocking climax would get most of the attention (from both critics and regular folks) and so focused on those to the detriment of the rest of the film.
But let’s take a second to look at that middle of the film which, after all, is most of the movie. For one thing, someone’s going to have to explain to me why it was so long. Why, for instance, does the shot where H.W. returns from the deaf school need to be nearly a minute? The shot opens on the pipeline being built. The camera moves to the right and finds Daniel walking to meet a car that is barely visible on the horizon. H.W. gets out of the car, walks to Daniel then runs away from him. Daniel chases him, catches him and pulls him close despite H.W.’s attempts to slap him.
Now, obviously, the shot is linking the fruition of Plainview’s business with the return of his son. And there are a number of other things going on here as well. Plainview wants his son to witness his greatest triumph. But he also wants his business partners and underlings to see his success as a parent. The audience watches the reunion from a distance to deny them any sense of satisfaction in seeing H.W. return and to make it impossible for them to read either of the characters’ faces while this is happening. And while that’s very compelling and interesting and clearly ripe for discussion, I don’t understand why the shot needs to last for nearly a minute and, further, why there needs to be so much dead time in the shot when people are walking across the field to meet each other. The meaning of the shot is clear within the first fifteen seconds. What is gained by drawing it out for another forty-five?
That shot, to me, is the film (at least the middle two-thirds of it) in microcosm. It has a lot to say and is very pretty to look at but it doesn’t have quite as much going on underneath the surface as it seems to think it does. And it certainly doesn’t have enough to say to justify how long it takes to say it. As someone once said, there just isn’t that much there there. I gave Anderson the benefit of the doubt and assumed there was more going on here than simply a discussion of how religion and capitalism are both easily corruptible and easily bent to serve the will of greedy men. But after two viewings, I’m not sure that there is. Obviously it’s a little more complicated than that reductive reading but not by much.
And that, ultimately, is why I can’t quite bring myself to call this film a masterpiece (even Anderson’s best). Interesting it may be. Pretty it may be. Fantastically acted it certainly is. But deeply compelling? I’m not so sure. And symbolically satisfying? Only intermittently. Obviously I’ve written pages and pages about this film so there’s something about it that’s worth discussing. I just don’t know if it warrants much more than what I’ve said here.
