There Will Be Blood Movie Review
By Jason Revill
Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) is an oil man. He’s an oil man in the truest sense of the word in that whatever runs through his veins must be as black as the stuff he pumps out of the ground. After receiving a tip from Paul Sunday (Paul Dano) that the Sunday family ranch is on top of an ocean of oil, Plainview heads to South Boston, California. Once there he sets out with his son H.W. (Dillon Freasier) to convince Sunday’s brother Eli (also played by Dano) and the rest of the town to allow him to begin drilling. As an evangelical preacher, Eli is wary of this outsider until it is agreed that there will be a sizeable donation to the church. The two men’s early disagreements set them on a path that will eventually be the end of both.
Daniel Plainview is one of, if not the best villain that has ever been captured on film. He certainly has to be the most straight up evil one. Hell, even when you take off Darth Vader’s mask there is what’s left of his shriveled humanity underneath it, but not with Planview. If you were to look inside him, there would be nothing but an empty black hole. Everything he says or does in There Will Be Blood serves only to further his own greed. Anything that even remotely looks like an act of kindness is purely accidental.
Take for example at his adopted son H.W. When we first see Plainview with him as a baby there isn’t an ounce of affection, he just looks at him like he would any other tool to find oil. We don’t know it at the time, but his only reason for keeping the boy is that he needs him to convince people that he is a family man in order to swindle homesteaders out of their land. As a matter of fact it’s almost as though he brings H.W. out when he needs him and then slips some whiskey in his milk to put him to sleep when he’s no longer needed. When H.W. becomes more of a burden than a tool Plainview gets rid of him as soon as his half-brother shows up, but when that goes sour and he needs to show that he’s a good father, he summons the boy back.
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