The year is 1898 and Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) is singularly pick-axing his way to gold. The sparks fly as he goes about his work, stopping only to better glean the oil encased on the rocks. His movements are deliberate and willful and only interrupted by a freak blast that Plainview faces with a steady posture. Fate isn’t finished with him yet however. It thrusts him into the well, breaks his foot, and leaves him unable to stand.
A lesser man would’ve marked the occasion as a sign to abscond from such a trade but after seeing the determined way Plainview crawls out of the mine and sets up a company four years later, we realize the kind of homo sapien we’re dealing with here. In those four years, Plainview has learned business acumen to go along with his crude, stocky mentality. Now, people work for him and extract the oil while he controls it. So when the next accident occurs, Daniel is nowhere close to it but his sense of remorse makes him adopt the dead man’s son, H.W (Dillon Freasier).
Two big scenes in and Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood has already set itself up as an epic, grim struggle between a man’s needs and ambition yet there is much more, metaphorically, to it than just Day-Lewis splendidly on show. The film functions oddly enough as an insider’s look at the struggle of two mega-entities: oil and religious power. The film is inscrutable in not seeming to side either way so one’s appreciation of it will vary but that has always been a hallmark of Anderson’s brilliant films (Magnolia, Boogie Nights). Loosely based on Upton Sinclair’s Oil!, the film also breaks down in stages the gaffes of power-building as it goes along. In the middle of it all is Plainview, craftily counting his fortune and swindling deals in the process. The character is atypical of a man who is hungry for power, but Day-Lewis’ careful modulation and unique physical permanence is astonishing to behold. It’s easily an Oscar role because the entire film is centered around it and not vice versa. Though his turn in Gangs of New York was his most quintessential, it is here Day-Lewis totally dominates, facial expressions and all.
Given a tip on oil in a California area, Plainview sets off. When the tip rings true, he immediately tries to swindle the family whose property the oil is on despite the great reception they have given him. He tells them he is hunting quail with his son but Eli Sunday (Paul Dano) knows different. He is the local firebrand pastor, thus wields power and instructs Daniel to pay the church ten thousand dollars for the land as a "contribution".
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Article comments
1 - Jordan Richardson
I don't think there's any question that greed is what drives both Plainview and Eli.