Obviously I and a lot of other people disagree about that, but your takeaway from the film is your own.

You are either discounting or forgetting the regret that Daniel displays on two occasions: one, when it is forced out of him during Eli's humiliation-baptism at the church; two, when he stumbles drunkenly down the stairs and collapses after chasing HW away near the end of the film. Daniel IS a human being in this…

That is only in the case of insanity that is caused by physiological issues in the brain unconnected to a person's actions. It is evident that Anderson's intent is to present Plainview's mental state as directly consequential of his obsessions (which can themselves be seen as indicative of mental instability). You…

You can certainly connect his current actions to his previous actions, as his previous actions were what led him to commit his later actions. I didn't read Daniel as someone with a mental illness in the typical sense, but someone who had been driven mad by his own poor choices.

I don't think that's true at all. Daniel was never a "good" person in most senses of the term, but he did adopt HW (his later assertions that he did it in order to emotionally manipulate land sellers was only partially true—caring for the infant HW as a single man in the early 1900s was likely a tremendous burden with…

The final act was the culmination of what all his behavior brought him: the loss of his son and complete moral bankruptcy. On a less literal level, the final scene between Daniel and Eli depicts the amorality of capitalism devouring ("I told you would eat you!") and destroying the religion that is devoid of…

I think that's also part of the larger point. His unfettered thirst for money and his pointless war against the fraudulent preacher corrupted him and drove him insane.

Obviously this is my personal opinion, just like everything else in here is personal opinion. I think we can both agree that PT Anderson makes challenging films that often succeed and sometimes fail, and by nature of his technique will alienate his audiences as often as he connects with them.

Well, in certain ways, sure. But it's undeniable that money and religion have long been twin currents in American society overall, sometimes working in opposition to each other and sometimes flowing together.

It demands more, but it gives less. And that's the problem. In order for an audience to accede to a filmmaker's demands, they have to care about the story and the characters. I was deeply invested in There Will Be Blood throughout its running time; at the end of The Master, I simply didn't care.

There Will Be Blood was opaque in certain moments, but it wasn't incoherent and it definitely didn't end without consequence.

The difference to me is that There Will Be Blood earns its demands from the audience while The Master did not.

No matter how high-quality it may have been, I can't put a film that opens with a man kicking a dog to death on any "Best Of" lists.

Well, it didn't fail (at least not for me), which is why I value the film so highly. It's one of the few that lived up to its grand ambitions. You could write a textbook just on the Biblical metaphors.

The film had shown very little subtlety even before the final act. The outsize tone was meant to match the outsize personalities of Daniel and Eli, because the film operates best as a macro-level metaphor for American society.

That I'm not doubting. I'm simply saying that Scorsese comes about some of the criticism honestly because of the tone with which he chose to pitch the film. No one would be talking about how the film was repellant if it had been directed the same way as Goodfellas, but others also probably wouldn't be talking about…

People are confused because Scorsese plays the material comedically.

You have to be kidding. You think that Plainview suffered no consequences simply because it didn't show them? Films have to end somewhere, you know, and There Will Be Blood would have been the worse for delving into the aftermath of Eli's murder. The film was about Daniel and his descent into utter depravity, which…

Its deliberate opacity, its incoherence, its shaggy-dog ending……

As I said in an earlier thread, the scene that sums up The Master is the desert motorcycle scene, with Paul Thomas Anderson driving madly towards distant, strange mountains while the audience stands back at the car and shouts "Where the fuck are you going?!" to no avail.