Starting at the 4:50 mark of this film essay, Matt Zurcher identifies three kinds of baptism that serve as visual rhymes in P.T. Anderson’s great “There Will Be Blood.”
Anderson will be coming out with “The Master” this fall, a film that looks to continue his engagement with religious themes.
Update: Gabriel Rossman provides an interesting look at the ways “There Will Be Blood” departs from Upton Sinclair’s Oil! (on which it was loosely based) at Code and Culture.
August 24th, 2012 | 5:32 pm
I’ll look forward to “The Master as well.” But for a moment you had me really going, thinking that perhaps it was a production of Bulgakov’s “The Master and Margarita.” Not sure how the latter would translate to the screen, though.
August 24th, 2012 | 9:14 pm
In my opinion, There will be Blood is a very long and boring movie.
August 25th, 2012 | 2:21 pm
“Great”? Seriously? That’s the only movie I’ve ever left and asked for my money back. Besides being evil, it was also, as Pete so justly observes, boring.
Some of the plot devices could have been occasions for interesting psychological portraits – e.g. the adoption of the boy, the contrast of the two fanatics and their respective leaderships.
But in fact they were boring, because the filmmakers were so locked into their own secularist and liberal pieties that it killed their moral imagination.
Imagine if they had dared to depict a businessman who was honest as well as grasping, or even capable of some natural affection. Or if they could imagine a religious leader might actually be a believer rather than a conscious charlatan.
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