Almost 2 months ago, Paul Thomas Anderson surprised me. He went down into his hole, swung his pickaxe, and emerged with an Amethyst, so I decided to see how he fared with oil. Unfortunately there were no surprises to delight in this time around. The filmmaker that seemed so free in Inherent Vice and even Licorice Pizza is constrained here to making a singular statement, over and over.

Perhaps it’s the purpose of the statement that’s supposed to give There Will Be Blood its inherent value. The film follows Daniel Plainview (Day-Lewis) who is less of a character and more of a characteristic. A greedy, violent oil tycoon, he finds his foil in Eli Sunday (Dano) a preacher who smacks and kisses the demons out of his congregation. The clash between the two is codified in their names, which are somehow more obvious than the character names in Anderson’s film about pornstars. Of course, the men themselves aren’t that different from each other in that they’re both lying opportunists. They are both Americans after all. Looking up to his idol Robert Altman, America is Anderson’s true subject.

But Anderson never drills down into things. If you want to weave a tapestry, you need more than one thread, and unlike Altman’s films, this doesn’t allow itself community or even diversion. And a bigger problem: I don’t buy the two salesmen at the center. The lack of depth is frustrating and the performances don’t help, everything stays at one volume. The most iconic scene from the film is the bloody, climactic confrontation between Plainview and Sunday. Right before the oft-quoted “I DRINK YOUR MILKSHAKE!,” Day-Lewis yells “DRAINAGE!” and all of the saliva vacates his mouth. It’s a performance just big enough that it’s impossible to get lost in. Anderson also chooses this moment to be comic, so we’re left with two sketches in a sketch. The final dialogue of the film being “I’m finished!” A gruesome murder cutting to the foreshadowing title card.

Or is the title an entendre? There will not be blood for Daniel Plainview. Blood as in “flesh and”. Plainview’s son is adopted and his long-lost brother Henry turns out to be an impostor trying to share in the wealth. The story of fake Henry is where Anderson’s drama works the best. Not only since it lends Plainview a bit of much-needed depth, but as far as lying opportunists go, Henry is the most compelling. This also makes it so the best parts of that final scene are not the darkly-comic, award-winning monologues, loud acting, or the violence itself. Instead, it’s Eli’s frantic plea to Daniel before he gets bludgeoned to death by a bowling pin: “We’re family! We’re brothers!”