![]() But the film, to its credit, wants audiences to be revolted by what they see of him. Audiences aren’t told why Daniel’s thorny exterior softens around children, though we do witness him weeping when he sees an old picture of a child-perhaps himself-tucked into his brother’s journal.ĭaniel is arguably the worst character of a bad lot. tells him that one of the girls in the Sunday family is beaten when she doesn’t pray, Daniel buys the girl a new dress and confronts her father. Later, convicted about “unloading” his kid so he won’t have to bother with him, Daniel brings the boy back and hires a teacher for him. away to a special school-not an altogether positive development for either of them-he makes sure H.W.’s new room is big enough. grunts and moans, trying to hear himself. He lies beside the boy the night after the injury, holding him and stroking his hair as H.W. goes deaf, Daniel does what he can to help him at first. Though this father-son relationship is complex and murky, Daniel takes the boy with him everywhere and seems, in his own way, to love him. In that moment, an acrid rivalry is born between oilman and faith healer for the mind, soul and wealth of the tiny hardscrabble settlement around them.ĭaniel does, apparently, have a soft spot for children-particularly his adopted son. Eli says, “For my church.” “That’s a good one,” Daniel replies. What’s all that money for? Daniel wants to know. “We’re going to give them quail prices.”īut Paul’s twin brother, Eli, demands more. “We’re not going to give them oil prices,” he whispers to H.W. Thinking the rest of the Sunday clan isn’t aware of the black gold burbling beneath their feet, Daniel plans to buy the place for a song. So, when a young man named Paul Sunday tells Daniel there’s oil on his family’s parched goat ranch, it’s business as usual: Daniel scouts the property by pretending he and his boy just want to hunt quail there. It’s mostly shtick, of course, a greasy ploy to separate people from their mineral rights as quickly and cheaply as possible. He says he’s one of them: honest, plainspoken, a family man raising his son the best he can. #THERE WILL BE BLOOD FULL#“I’m an oilman,” he tells rooms full of farmers and ranchers who own the oil-rich California land he craves. The boy is about 10 when we first hear Daniel speak-in a deep, erudite voice that seems oddly out of place on the rural stage he walks across. In the years to come, he’ll introduce the boy, H.W., as his son and partner. But when one of his partners is killed, Daniel takes that man’s orphaned infant baby as his own. “There are times when I look at people and see nothing worth liking,” he says much later. Perhaps he can’t take the time to talk with them-folks he considers beneath him. He lies patiently on the floor as an assayist measures his newfound wealth and worth.įour years later, in 1902, he’s working with other people-digging for oil now, not silver-but still he’s hushed. With barely a moan, he struggles up the shaft and literally drags himself into town with a handful of silver-streaked rocks. When his makeshift ladder breaks, Daniel plummets to the pit floor, shattering his leg. For the first 15 minutes of There Will Be Blood, he works in solitary silence, chipping and digging for silver in a dark, jagged pit in the middle of a bleached, waterless wasteland. ![]()
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