Photo Courtesy Paramount Vantage

On Sunday morning our intimate group of six sat for brunch at Atlanta's West Egg. All of us arts obsessed, the group included one film producer, two filmmakers, two actresses and myself, and while it wouldn't be terribly unusual for us to have a conversation about any art topic, the vast majority of our overlapping chatter this particular moment fixated on the city's weekend opening of Paul Thomas Anderson's beautiful and bewildering There Will Be Blood.There's a quirk that happens well too often in Atlanta, even among fervent film fans; an independent film, even those distributed by the big guns, will enter and exit the city consciousness so quickly that it goes unnoticed. Opening weekends, much as in the rest of the country, count significantly, especially in a theater schedule run of a mere one to two weeks. So in looking around our table, and realizing that all six of us had seen the film either for the first or second time in a period of two days, I was confirmed in my thoughts, which up until this time had been unvalidated, that There Will Be Blood is a singular masterpiece crafted by a filmmaker who has finally made a film not for himself but for his audience.

Based on Upton Sinclair's 1927 novel Oil!, Anderson's adaptation observes more than manipulates its characters. There's little sense of the artifice grafted into Boogie Nights, Magnolia or Punch Drunk Love here. Rather there's what every critic in the country has called 'a maturity' to Anderson's gaze, particularly with his clement appraisal of the hardened, raging and emotionally elusive Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis). Day-Lewis' performance is nothing less than remarkable, his control over Plainview's ecstasies and anxieties so acute that he resurrects the spirit of the brutal American work ethic dogma, now laid away with the decline of Manifest Destiny. In contrast and without the capitalist grounding that grinds Plainview to his oil search,, the characters Paul Sunday/Eli Sunday (Paul Dano) falter on the lines of the spiritually meek and fanatic. At first a quietly commanding screen presence, Dano bursts into a magic dance of sermon so primal that his every motion is a revelation and the slightest change in his intonation begs an exploration. It's a performance of a true artist, and unlike Tom Cruise's ephemeral brilliance in Magnolia, signals a continuity of Dano's dedication to nailing every role passed his way.

Jaime Mahany sits directly across from me at the table, and her eyes, when she gets excited, sparkle with an easy, intelligent depth. "I always watch a film first for its story. Then I'll go back to watch it for its symbols and then its technique, but, I found myself noticing small things in the film. I was fixated on Plainview's hands," she says. "I've done stage make-up before, but these make-up artists [John Blake, Kim Ayers and Catherine Conrad] were amazing. His hands were always dirty. Even when he was rich, the lines and texture of his hands always pointed out that he was an oil man."

"It's a masterpiece," Mark Wynns says. As if Mark has lit a particular fire with the statement, the conversation from here on becomes a mesh of quick cuts and comments.

Jaime: "And, he doesn't say that lightly. When he saw it the first time and told me that, I was wary because usually hype just means I'll be disappointed. But, I got out of the film, and he said, 'I could see that again,' and I understood."

Mark: "I saw on Spout there's already a fan site for it idrinkyourmilkshake.."

Jaime: "He told me there was a line in the film that was going to be the next iconic film line, but he wouldn't tell me what it was. I was looking for it during the whole film, thinking, 'Is this the line?' 'Could this be the line?'"

Self: "That was the monologue that lost me to the character a bit. I didn't buy how overblown that section of the film got, and in fact, when the news first started leaking out of the New York press, people made mention that they thought the end was funny, hysterical actually. I was in a press screening with six or seven other people, and none of us laughed. Apparently, people find it funny though, and I don't know what to think about that."

Chris Skeene: "I thought it was funny, but I didn't laugh out loud."

Mark: "The bowling ball sequence was a bit slapsticky, but that leads up to the shock of the those last moments."

Self: "That last line isn't funny to me at all because I really do think of the film as Capitalism killing Christianity and for Plainview then capitalism makes itself the new religion."

Jaime: "It's a religion of oil. That's what he knows. That's what he's always around, and so it's not for the love of the money. He's living in a shack for that whole time with his 'brother'. It's a true love of the oil."

Chris: "And, every time he strikes oil, there's the blood. There's a death."

While these two characters of Plainview and Sunday hold spotlight throughout the majority of the film, the supporting and minor roles are so significant to sell the hate and panic of the narrative that their slightest reactions resonate powerfully. In a heart-wrenching and tightly controlled performance, Dillon Freasier, who plays Plainview's adopted son H.W., carries the weight of both his bitterness and love in silence. The sacrificial lamb of the story, Freasier's H.W. shrugs off sentimentality for a meanness of spirit only broken by the generosity of communication, a link from father to son that Plainview is unwilling to tie.

"I was having this conversation with The Signal guys [Alexander Motlagh, Jacob Gentry, David Bruckner, Dan Bush] about that last scene when H.W. comes to speak with Plainview, and he calls his son, 'a bastard in a basket,' Mark says. "He's got the two lanes in the bowling alley, but without H.W., there's no one to play with."

"There is certainly a love Plainview has for his son, but it's so tied up with guilt that he can't understand it any longer," I say. "He can understand the tangible problems in front of him, but when he's hit with a spiritual problem, he doesn't know how to handle it."

"Even the scene in the church where he's repenting--" Chris starts.

Mark: "'Give me the blood. Give me the blood."

Chris: "He's doing it just to get the oil. It's not a real conversion."

Mark: "And, Eli knows that too. Everybody knows that, but they play along with it anyway."

Self: "See, I didn't see it that way at all. There is a repentance in the constant repetition of the thought that he abandoned his son. He's dealing with those lines in a hard way, but I think there's an actual desire for forgiveness he feels there."

There's such a large amount of ambiguity about the film. No character is easy to hold down. None of their intentions or reactions are trustworthy, notwithstanding perhaps H.W. who maintains, even through his hardships, a sense of innocence. It's a power play that doesn't know the rules of a game, and in fact, the only rule seems to be that Plainview must always end up the winner. The ambiguity also spills out into the relationship between the Sunday brothers, as Jamie points out a bit later: "I did find it interesting that Paul Dano is credited as Paul Sunday/Eli Sunday with no separation."

Self: "I thought Paul/Eli were the same person."

Chris: "I don't think they could be. First off, they approach Plainview so differently. Paul just comes with his information, wants to get paid and leaves, and with Eli, there's that fight and tension."

Self: "I just thought that was a metaphor for the duality of man, that we both have two distinct sides, and that both of those extremes in us can fail."

Chris: "But, then Plainview also references Paul at the end and tells Eli that he was the prophet brother, and Eli seems genuinely surprised by that. I just don't see how they couldn't have been two different people."

"I have to go back and watch the film for those symbols," Jaime repeats, this time almost to herself.

It's around this time the conversation begins to quiet, all of us having eaten our food, drained our coffees and glasses of water. Yet, there is still a palpably energized conduct to the air, as if we've hardly exhausted the conversation, only the time we can share together before going separate ways to already filled afternoons. If it can be said that the highest honor a film can receive is that it must be talked of, There Will Be Blood is one among few at the top of that list of recognition.

There Will Be Blood plays in hometown Atlanta at the Tara theater.