Killspeak

He turned, pulling a pillow from under his head and tucking it under his arm. He was about to push his face down into the mattress when he noticed the knife. It was tucked between the mattress and headboard, blade out. Awake, fully and so suddenly, his face hesitated inches from its point.

He slid back. How did it get there? How long had it been there? He hadn’t made the bed in days and had been sleeping in it for days. A pairing knife hidden under his pillow.

When I see There Will Be Blood, I feel like I’ve watched a fantastic film. P.T. Anderson’s film is so rich in so many ways. I embarrass myself with the strength and number of adjectives I use when describing it to friends. Yet there is a strange feeling that, as much as I’m keen to shout my love for There Will Be Blood from the rooftops, I’m wrong; that I’ll find it tapped and drained.

The third act? When I first saw it, I enjoyed it. I went to see the film a second time largely to confirm that I did. I read reviews damning it, giving good reasons why it did not work with the rest of the film. I came in the second time with a long list of poor choices made by Anderson, of reasons why it crippled an otherwise outstanding masterwork. Daniel becomes a ridiculous caricature of himself. His way of dealing with his son, and with Eli are not in keeping with who he was. The dialogue is full of holes; it feels like Anderson speaking through the characters. The film ends abruptly, unfairly. And so on. I had read up. I was set to take the final act apart.

I didn’t. I couldn’t. I fell into the movie, immersed until the credits. The consistency of character, the radical shift in visual and emotional tone—my awareness of these things dissolved. Whatever seemed a failure on paper, worked wonderfully on screen. I did not leave the theatre feeling cheated or confused. I left smiling. “That was one goddamn helluva show.”

But I’m still not as confident of the film’s greatness as I should be. Perhaps its shocking third act overwhelms me; a magnet spinning my critical compass. Perhaps it’s the way the film squirms around, making it difficult to fit it into some interpretive harness. Perhaps I feel guilty for having liked it so much more than every other film I’ve seen recently. Perhaps I lack enough confidence in my own tastes, or am too aware of how they change.

I don’t know what it is that makes me hesitate. As much as I have enjoyed There Will Be Blood, I have a nagging feeling that I may, after future viewings, come to regret thinking so highly of it. As Vern says (via Rumsey Taylor):

Anderson’s There Will Be Blood has the feeling of greatness. It has the smell of greatness, the texture of it. It flirts with greatness. I’m pretty sure it even left the club with greatness last night but there is no way yet for us to know if it got lucky with greatness. We can only catch up with it later and ask it. If it turns out later that it was only faking it I’ll have to admit it had me fooled.