No redemption, no story
THERE WILL BE BLOOD
Paramount Vantage, Miramax Films
Certificate 15
What makes a great story a great film? Having read some of the high acclaim for this film through January and February, I entered the cinema hoping to gain some insight to this question. After all, There will be blood opened to critical accolades; it is being mentioned in the same breath as some of the great films of all time.
To be sure, there are some great performances in this film. Daniel Day-Lewis got an Oscar and Paul Dano deserves praise for some great acting. But, as I left the cinema, I was not convinced I had witnessed greatness; if I had, it had the taste of the disappointment of ‘is that all there is?’ The problem is that, although the performances may grab a viewer, the story does not.
Journey of oilman
The story, based on Upton Sinclair’s novel Oil, is essentially the life story of Daniel Plainview (Day-Lewis), his journey from silver prospector to oil tycoon. Plainview has a single goal — to get rich through oil. All else is set aside in this pursuit: the community in which he arrives, friends, acquaintances and, ultimately, what family he has.
Church planter
Set alongside Plainview is the other central figure, Eli Sunday (Dano), a young man with a desire to establish his own church. In selling the family’s land to Plainview, Sunday hopes to secure money for the church. In Plainview and Sunday, the business minded materialist and the wacky religious spiritualist are set side by side. The emptiness of material things is underlined as Plainview gets rich but his relationships fall apart. Plainview reaches the twilight of his life in a continuous drunken fog shooting his own possessions and disowning his adopted son. Yet, equally, religion is undermined by the depiction of the church and Sunday as wacky and ultimately money hungry. Within this context, the presented message of the gospel — forgiveness for sinners through Jesus Christ — is mocked.
This is the terrible sadness of the film. On one hand, it is a parable about the love of money and how setting one’s heart on such things leads to ruin. But redemption from these things is laughed off and so the film ends without hope. At the end of the film, all that is left is a hateful and lonely man uttering the despondent words, ‘I’m finished!’
Nowhere to go
The film itself struggles with this concept. Half of the film details Plainview’s rise to wealth as he builds his oil business, but then doesn’t really have anywhere to go and therefore does not take the audience with it. There is no hope or redemption just a spiralling depression as it becomes more and more evident where it is ending.
Most great stories expose human weakness and even depravity and yet catch eternal themes through the offer of hope or redemption. Redemption is mocked in this film and therefore there is no great story.
We are left with some great performances to distract us from the hopelessness of it all. It is a sad comment on our world if people are more concerned with performance than with a story of hope for a brighter future.
If this is life, humans are to be pitied above all. Praise God for the great and true story of the gospel.
