Ms. Stevens,

You said that you were "of the camp that puzzled over the comic-histrionic coda of There Will Be Blood, not sure how its departure in rhythm and tone—not to mention the sudden appearance of a bland adult actor in the key role of the oilman's son, so wonderfully played up till then by the nonprofessional child actor Dillon Freasier—flowed from what came before." I wonder what people suppose the movie to be about that they think something is missing in the leap from 1911 to the late 20s (is that right? 1927?) when the movie ends. The pipeline is effectively complete and Daniel's fortune assured, and though this doesn't preclude there having been similar such coups in the time elided, seeing or knowing about them would be superfluous: the mansion says all we need to know. There is nothing left to show but what is shown in the end: skip to a man wasted by his own wealth, ennui, and resentments--a man who, when offered the buyout for his holdings, asks: "what would I do?"; whom we see as a fledgling oilman toiling with his workers in the air-poisoned mire; and who, true to his word in his speech to the settlers of the land on which he would drill, was not content to collect on his production in wealth and leisure from afar, but insisted on overseeing his operation in person while living humbly and simply out of a shack. Despite its length, There Will Be Blood is remarkably economical and lean. The 1911 sequence ends by neatly establishing the trajectories that point rather predictably (and this is no slight) to the film’s ending. The “leap” from pipeline in completion and H.W.'s being taught sign language while Mary, the sister of Daniel's now arch-nemesis, who we already anticipate will develop some kind of relationship with H.W., learns it too (by choice in contrast to H.W.'s necessity) in no leap—not on the film’s discursive terms, at least. To complain that a lot of years intervene and that a child has grown into a man behind our backs strike me as not at all to the point. Segueing from sign lesson to sign marriage is a smooth and lovely transition (one of the few fond moments in so bleak and dark a film) and a bit of trim causation. So is the cut to the mansion in which Daniel is drunk and firing a gun a consequence of his success and his son’s formerly budding, and now consummated, love. Daniel is a social monogamist who expects nothing less than the same devotion in return. His “brother” suffered for his betrayal and so does his “son.” That is continuity. Daniel begins as a desperate, primal figure crouching in silence on a barren landscape quoting Kubrick’s "The Dawn of Man” and ends by clubbing his enemy in reference to the same sequence in the same film (the discovery of tools; the waterhole). The ending is integral and very much in key.