![]() He despises the abuse, even going so far as to make a mockery of Abel at the dinner table, emasculating him for being an abusive father. Daniel is the one who stops the abuse Mary is getting from her father at home. And consider the other child in the film, young Mary, the daughter of Abel Sunday and the younger sister of Paul and Eli Sunday. Throughout the film, until the unfortunate accident (which I will discuss at length in a moment), Daniel works alongside H.W., never minimalizing him, never trivializing him or exploiting him. ![]() In his opening monologue to a collection of townsfolk reluctant to let him build, he says he is a family man, which he is. Plainview as he grows older in order to manipulate people into allowing him to drill on their land, I see no real evidence of this. This is something he did not have to do, and while there may be the argument that Daniel takes the boy H.W. One of the men in the well with Plainview has a child, and when an accident kills that man, with Plainview right down their in the oil with him, it is Daniel who decides to care for the young child. The first fifteen minutes lack any dialogue, but they introduce us to Daniel as what he is, a man consumed by money, so much so that after falling and breaking his leg, he drags himself out of the well and into town to cash in on the silver he had found. ![]() After discovering oil, Daniels destiny is set for the remainder of the picture, as he brings along a minimal crew and begins pulling the black gold from the ground. Without any dialogue, we are given a glimpse as to what drives this man: profit. In the opening scenes of There Will Be Blood, we see Plainview, a single-minded prospector hacking away at the earth in search of silver deposits. Of course, every protagonist needs an antagonist, and I think there is a clear answer as to who that is in the film. In fact, if I were forced to label, I would have to say Plainview is the protagonist of the story, an antihero so corrupted by greed and power that he loses sight of himself and his obsessions drive him to solitary madness. But looking closer at this man, played by Daniel Day Lewis in one of the all time great film roles, he is not the villain here. As he scowls, grumbles, glares, and slinks his way through the picture, his bursts of outrage and violence, and his single-minded obsession with greed may paint him outwardly as a scoundrel through and through. It is easy to label Daniel Plainview, the oil man at the center of Paul Thomas Andersons American epic There Will Be Blood, as a villain.
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