Last week in class we watched the film There Will Be Blood. This film was inspired by the book Oil! by Upton Sinclair. It is about a man named Daniel Plainview, played by Daniel Day-Lewis. Daniel has his own drilling company and works along side his business partner, and son, HW. A man, Paul Sunday, came to meet with Daniel to tell him about an oil deposit underneath his family’s property and Daniel tries to buy the property from his family so that he can drill the oil from the property and from here, the film takes off.

Daniel Plainview has many different traits, positive and negative ones. In the beginning of the movie, when him and his crew found oil, his crew had died and one man left behind a baby. Daniel takes in this baby and raises him as his own, his name is HW. Daniel, at times, seems to really care about and love HW. However, later on HW loses his hearing during and explosion and after this happens it seems as though Daniel doesn’t care about him anymore. I really liked seeing that caring dad side of him but it quickly went away. Daniel is also very greedy, manipulative and selfish. All he wants to do it get rich off of oil and he manipulates people out of their land so that he can strike the oil that is under their property. I am a person who actually really likes the “villain” of a movie because it’s something that I cannot relate to at all and they’re just interesting to me. But if this was not a movie and Daniel Plainview was a real person, I would absolutely despise him.

From the beginning of the film, Daniel Plainview is just a no one. He works as prospector and he is alone. He finds some silver in a mine and gets a certificate for it, later establishing his own drilling company. He adopted HW and is deemed as a “family man” to his clients. At first, I thought he was a truly loving father but that changes and we see that throughout the film. We see that Daniel becomes very greedy and manipulative to get what he wants – the oil, so that he can become rich. He does whatever it takes to get this. By the end of the film, he is once again alone and very hateful. He has turned to alcoholism and HW has abandoned him just as he did before to HW. There is a scene at the end of the film when HW comes to see Daniel and cut off their partnership so that HW can start up his own drilling company in Mexico with his wife. This is where we see just how hateful Daniel has become, or always was. I believe that Daniel changed a lot from the first scene to the last scene.

Daniel Day-Lewis is a method actor and extremely selective about the roles that he plays. For the roles he has played, he has researched immensely and has transformed himself into those characters. For a lot of his roles, he has stayed in character the whole time during filming, even when the cameras were not rolling. So while Daniel Day-Lewis is not like Daniel Plainview, he did a lot to prepare for the role. He prepared to play as Daniel Plainview for 3 years. One of his 3 Academy Awards for Best Actor was won for this role. Daniel Day-Lewis is an outstanding actor, and I thoroughly enjoy every film I see with him in it.

There Will Be Blood is a very good film, one of my favorites we have watched in class thus far. I think it had a lot to do with Day-Lewis’s acting in the film, but I really enjoyed watching this.