'There Will Be Blood' wishes you a very happy Father's Day

Happy Father’s Day from Paul Thomas Anderson! The Blu-Ray edition of There Will Be Blood has just arrived in stores, and I’d like to think that its perfect-for-dads-and-grads timing isn’t coincidental — that its release now really is intended to give the paterfamilias in your household a timely refresher course in how not to be a parent. Sure, that connection is a bit of a stretch on my part. (The delay between the standard DVD two months ago and this high-def edition really has to do with Paramount needing time to shift gears to Blu-Ray after the competing format they’d backed, HD-DVD, went kaput.) But the timing is fitting, since there’s no one who makes “family” films quite like P.T. Anderson. Yes, I’ll explain.

First, let’s correct one of the most common misperceptions about a movie that invites all kinds of misunderstandings. Think of Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean” for a moment and sing this refrain: The kid is not my son. Probably a majority of reviews and blogs about the film mistakenly referred to the boy in the story, H.W, as being the “son” of the drama’s central figure, Daniel Plainview.  He’s not, although you have to be paying attention during the movie’s mostly silent opening reel to realize that H.W.’s real father dies in an oil drilling accident about 13 minutes in, at which point the antihero, played by Daniel Day-Lewis,  takes over the orphan’s raising. (Warning: There will be spoilers.) H.W. is a fake son, just as it turns out later that Daniel’s would-be brother, Henry, is a phony sibling, too. Why is all this so significant? Because if Anderson’s disparate films — from Boogie Nights to this one — tend to all be about anything, it’s lonely people who have either no kin or horrible kin going to great lengths to create all-new, makeshift families for themselves. And if you view Daniel Plainview himself as a sort of overgrown orphan boy whose growing monstrousness masks a longing to have some “blood” of his own, then he becomes an almost sympathetic character, instead of just the ultimate Bad Dad.

There Will Be Blood was one of the most acclaimed films of 2007, yet it’s remarkable how few of its admirers have grappled with what it’s really about, other than to make vague proclamations about Anderson illuminating the evils of greed. Is it oil, or some sort of metaphorical commentary on what modern progressives refer to as “blood for oil”? Perhaps, to some extent, although if that’s what really concerned the writer-director, you’d think he wouldn’t have completely thrown out the second half of the agitprop novel on which it was officially based, Upton Sinclair’s epic Oil!, in favor of the completely original, weirdly intimate psychodrama that eventually dominates the film. Did Anderson mean to use the conflict between Plainview and the phony-baloney local preacher to comment on the respective failings of commerce and religion? Maybe; the fact that the phrase “there will be blood” has its origins in the Old Testament (and here you thought he ripped it off from the Saw ad campaign!) supports that view. But if you believe that successful auteurs tend to have ongoing preoccupations, and you look at Anderson’s earlier movies, you’ve got to believe that Blood is about family, or the lack of it.

In Hard Eight, a.k.a. Sydney, the director's first movie, John C. Reilly is all but adopted by Philip Baker Hall, who’s even better at being a father figure than he is a con man. In Boogie Nights, Mark Wahlberg deserts a dysfunctional family to take up with a more functional clan that just happens to be a porno repertory company. (Julianne Moore even offers to be Heather Graham’s mommy.) In Magnolia, Tom Cruise and Melora Walters both have some pretty serious daddy issues to deal with; one copes by becoming an obnoxiously extroverted motivational speaker, the other by completely withdrawing. The salvation from family via romantic love that Walters experiences in that film is further explored in Punch-Drunk Love, the first Anderson film that really had more to do with coupling than family dynamics. While we didn’t learn too much about Adam Sandler’s parents in that one, we get hints of how messed up things were from his damaged relationship with his domineering sisters—and how the nurturing love of a woman might heal what got screwed up at home.

There’s no such hope in the gleefully fatalistic There Will Be Blood, of course. But the same attention to family issues and emotional longings is there, which is why it’s a little sad that so many of the film’s fans saw the protagonist as nothing but a supervillain in the tradition of Bill the Butcher, Day-Lewis’ Gangs of New York bad guy. Call me crazy, but I continue to be touched by Daniel Plainview every time I see the film — murderous, retributive wretch that he is. The key to how you see his character will be how you react to the penultimate sequence, and whether you think he means it when he tells his “son” that he was a “bastard in a basket” whom he only used to get ahead in business. I think some viewers are so relishing the idea of Day-Lewis as a depraved sociopath at that point that they miss the torture the character inflicting on himself. Anderson goes out of his way to make sure we don’t miss his inner conflict by throwing in a flashback to happier times, with Daniel tousling the hair of his adopted progeny — one of many affectionate moments that show his love for the boy was real, not something manufactured for the sake of capitalist gain. For whatever reason, Daniel is driven to alienate anyone who might ever love him. And though that probably wasn’t your father, chances are you know somebody who did have a dad like that, even if he never ended up knocking anybody off with a bowling pin.

When Daniel sends his son away for good, it's clear — from that well-placed flashback — that he is casting himself into the fiery furnace of hell, wherein he really lands in the final scene that follows. I think Anderson’s message is this: If we can’t find a way to bond with our own blood — be it real family or the kind of people we adopt into our lives as family — then our wounds fester, and there will be blood, the other kind, violence, finally bubbling up like oil.

So on that light note, please: Fire up the PlayStation3, pick up There Will Be Blood on Blu-Ray (the format that might well have been invented for just this gorgeous a movie), and watch it this Sunday with someone you love, preferably a father or father figure. And for God’s sake, go out and share a milkshake afterward, will you?