“I – drink – your – milkshake!”

To merely call Daniel Plainview a caricature of the dark side of American capitalism would not do Daniel Day-Lewis’ achievement in Paul Thomas Anderson’s “There Will Be Blood” enough justice. Metaphoric purposes aside, Plainview is a man capable of both ends of the human spectrum: quiet introspection and hyperbolic intensity, paternal responsibility and sadistic inhumanity. He adopts and rears a son, H.W., sends him away to a school for the deaf after a terrible accident, and later dismisses him as a “bastard in a basket.” He clashes with a fanatical evangelist, Eli Sunday, and proceeds to humiliate him every which way with verbal invective, physical abuse and, ultimately, a bowling pin.

With Daniel Plainview, Anderson and Day-Lewis forged a fittingly over-the-top summation of power-hungry men haunting the corridors of cinema past. The character’s ambition is virtually endless, and his downward spiral into inhuman depths is as awe-inspiring as it is terrifying. In a similar vein, Day-Lewis’ role immersion produced this generation’s most indelible feat of method acting: It’s nearly impossible to tell where the actor ends and the character begins. Not that it matters. In dark, brooding, Machiavellian fashion, Daniel Day-Lewis as Daniel Plainview coined a catch phrase, dominated a celluloid reel and defined a decade.

IN LOFTY COMPANY:
They gained the world, only to lose their soul.

Left to right: Charles Foster Kane (Orson Welles, “Citizen Kane”); Noah Cross (John Huston, “Chinatown”); Michael Corleone (Al Pacino, “The Godfather Part II”)

Image Sources: Miramax Films, RKO Pictures, Paramount Pictures, Paramount Vantage