"I have a competition in me. I want no one else to succeed. . . I hate most people."--Daniel Plainview
Daniel Plainview has done whatever it took him to get to the top of the oil business, to do deals with others to attain his wealth, success and seclusion. Although I won't say he wasn't an honest, hardworking businessman who took all the (nearly) legal steps to get to where he is by the end. Eventually spending his days shooting his rifle at random objects inside the halls of his mansion.
Drunk, dark, wobbly, and greasy. But alas, this is we feel, the payoff he has been working his whole life for. To do what he wants, inside his own walls, with only himself.
The two scenes that follow that introduction to Old Man Plainview are both, powerful, darkly comic and quite simply an astonishing show of an acting Grandmaster, who essentially, is just not acting anymore.
