I’ve never been more baffled by the critical reception of a film. We see critics labeling it a failed allegory, which strikes me as a specious leap from the merest fact that, yes, one character is an oil tycoon and another a priest—both touching great American themes, sure, but their presence in this or any movie hardly demands a treatise, and it strikes me as rather small-minded to expect one. If as viewers we don’t find what we expect and don’t then stop to ask whether what we’ve found instead has been by design rather than a failure of design, we’re only cheating ourselves. There Will Be Blood is a character study, and to those who think the characters were wooden or cardboard or mere caricatures, I would suggest that a degree of opacity is truer to life than definition. What’s important is how alive a character appears in the midst of his living, not how “complete” he appears in the final analysis. Any character that fails to thwart such analysis has been an exercise in reductiveness, but for moviegoers who don’t like to take films home with them, to leave with questions instead of answers, reductiveness is synonymous with depth. Does Daniel seem “over-the-top” in the second half of the film? When in its course do we leave behind that desperate, primitive figure huddled against the elements in the film’s opening? Ms. Stevens, in a former Movie Club, complained about the film’s narrative continuity, which I would argue is not only flawless, but perfectly paced with its continuity of character. The leap from 1911 to 1927 is essential. With the pipeline complete and Daniel's fortune assured, cue the mansion and The End. Daniel is 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 braving the same dangers we watch end the lives of others; 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. Daniel’s wealth hasn’t bought him any delicacy of manner or blunted what drives him. How anyone can think that this man, who’s already shown his capacity for murder and the harboring of powerful resentments, waking drunk and still enraged by his “son’s” betrayal, should act any differently towards Ely in that glorious bowling alley finale just hasn’t been paying attention.