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A Blood-y Mess? | Not everyone’s a fan of the bizarre sequence that concludes There WIll Be Blood.

Matt Zoller Seitz, The House Next Door | “There Will Be Blood is four-fifths of a near-masterpiece, but that final section in Daniel’s mansion devolves into a guided tour of Anderson’s DVD collection. Look: Giant! Over there: The Shining! Watch out, Citizen Kane coming through! And the climactic tête-à-tête evokes the worst of Magnolia—the Oscar-clip shouting and weeping and fighting, the graduate theater workshop blocking.... Daniel Day-Lewis’ highly stylized performance is exquisitely modulated up until that final stretch, at which point it turns into a cross between John Huston’s Noah Cross and Popeye the Sailor Man.” 

David Edelstein, New York | “There is blood, and when it comes it’s shocking and absurd—more grotesque than the end of Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America, in which the corrupted businessman ends up squashed in the back of a garbage truck. It’s Punch-and-Judy time in a private bowling alley, an ignominious finish to an age-old struggle. Reportedly, some preview audiences laughed derisively at the ending. I was agog. The movie doesn’t need a somber finale—it needs something go-for-broke batshit crazy as a counterpoint to the early, mythic images of tall, gushing wells.” 

Dana Stevens, Slate | “The bowling-alley showdown, which is also the last scene of the movie, feels like the director’s one misstep. It’s so broad, so shamelessly over-the-top, that the movie shifts from stark Oedipal drama to something like Grand Guignol. On a second viewing, the ending still bothered me, but a friend made a passionate case for it over drinks afterward. If nothing else, it’s a choice that will inspire great conversations.” 

Lucia Bozzola, The Simon | “Robert Altman, may he rest in sardonic peace, died before he could see ace protégé Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood. As someone who made a career out of interrogating all that ‘America’ held holy, I suspect he would have liked it. In one sweeping, phenomenal cinematic blow, Anderson flattens both America’s oil lust and smug piety. But oh, some might say, what about the ending? Well, let’s see. As the purveyor of such sublimely cheeky (and bleak) conclusions as Elliott Gould’s Philip Marlowe departing a killing to the strains of ‘Hooray for Hollywood’ in The Long Goodbye and Nashville’s post-assassination singalong to ‘It Don’t Worry Me,’ I daresay he would have been a fan. When the entire system is crazy, only craziness will result. Just ask Hawkeye and Trapper John.”