The outsider: themes from the work of Daniel Day-Lewis.

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In the final scene of There Will Be Blood, Daniel Day-Lewis drools. Just once for a moment. He doesn't drool like a child, or like an old man--though the scene finds his character at the end of a long life. Day-Lewis drools rabidly in mid-bark, like a Doberman, mean and mad, venting the rage that will eventually make good on the promise of the film's title. It is the penultimate scene of a performance that has left critics themselves drooling over Day-Lewis in their year-end wrap-ups and accolades. Awards for his work in There Will Be Blood have poured in from critics' circles on both coasts and everywhere in between--New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Phoenix, Austin--and bets are good that the awards season won't close out without an Oscar to add to his Screen Actors Guild and Golden Globe awards for Best Actor.

So what has the critics drooling? In some ways, it is hard to say. Whereas the awards have been more than forthcoming, less so has been analysis of Day-Lewis's performance. That reward has fallen instead to There Will Be Blood writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson whose themes, influences, and previous work have all been given due critical consideration in reviews. Day-Lewis, on the other hand, garners frequent nods as a "great actor," but less space is devoted to his own contribution to There Will Be Blood, especially how the film fits well within the themes of his twenty-year-plus career as a screen actor.

There Will Be Blood follows Day-Lewis in the life of Daniel Plainview, a self-described "oil man" running oil prospecting operations in sunny Southern California. The film begins in 1898 as Plainview successfully mines for silver, then strikes the black gold; he accumulates capital and soon starts buying up land for further oil drilling. An accident on a derrick leaves a baby boy orphaned, and Plainview adopts him. The film then jumps ahead to 1911 as Plainview proposes a land purchase to a town hall crowd, his young son standing beside him, proclaiming, "I run a family business."

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On the surface, There Will Be Blood is another of the actor's trademark makeovers, chock-full of novelty. Like usual, Day-Lewis looks his part--and walks and talks it too. Maybe he's worn a thick moustache and a greasy face in a role before, but never in this particular time and place, never in such a suit coat with a narrow timepiece dangling in front. Sitting at the town hall meeting, several pens burn a figurative hole in his front pocket awaiting contractual dotted-lines to sign, while a wide-brimmed hat sits on his head to protect from another burning heat, that of the Southwestern sun. When Plainview talks, complaining about the crowd, his voice is deep, authoritative, impatient, coarse, and above all, absolutely distinctive, having drawn frequent comparisons to that of the late director John Huston. When Plainview strikes out of the meeting and into the night, Day-Lewis affects a striding gait, hunched over with shoulders slightly raised, swinging arms at each side; he walks with conviction but also evinces a slight hobble, remnants of an early mining accident that stays in Day-Lewis's performance until the end of the film.

The character of Daniel Plainview is the sort of physical transformation Day-Lewis has been renowned for, at least since 1985, when My Beautiful Laundrette opened in theaters opposite A Room with a View. Audiences watching Day-Lewis play Johnny, a gay ex-skinhead, in Laundrette could hardly believe it was the same actor playing an effete Edwardian dandy in A Room with a View. Later on, as Day-Lewis took on starring roles, media stories emerged--undoubtedly encouraged by studio press junkets--dishing on the actor's intensity: sitting in a wheelchair for weeks in My Left Foot; being in jail for days for In the Name of the Father; skinning deer, carving a canoe, doing it all backwoods style for The Last of the Mohicans. It wasn't long before a quick succession of cliches clung to Day-Lewis in the press for every new film in which he appeared--"chameleonlike," "extreme," "the British De Niro"--cliches usually only matched in their superficiality by endless speculation about his personal life. (1)

They are cliches the actor has resisted. As Day-Lewis warned The Ottawa Citizen newspaper upon the release of My Left Foot in 1989, "It's a temptation, and a dangerous one, to be involved with the outside signs of change." In the case of My Left Foot, Day-Lewis frequently expressed concern in interviews that tales of his preparation for the role of Christy Brown, the Irish poet and painter with cerebral palsy, would overshadow the far greater importance of Brown's story. One could extend the same concern to Day-Lewis's career in general. Studios and media routinely emphasize selective elements of Day-Lewis's life and work. (2) In doing so, they draw attention away from the importance of what appears on-screen, his performances' numerous continuities from film to film, and the actor's own explanations of his work. (3) Ultimately, the significance of Day-Lewis's performances lies less in how they look, or even in how he achieves them, but rather in the complexity of the individuals he portrays and the power of the stories they tell.

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When Daniel Plainview proposes his oil deal to the town hall meeting early on in There Will Be Blood, the crowd loudly argues amongst themselves the merits of Plainview's proposal. It proves too much for Plainview--"Too much confusion," he says--so he walks out. But the confusion is only Plainview's excuse. The real problem is he's an individual in society, and he can't stand it. The man treats people as obstacles to navigate, a quality Day-Lewis indicates with a girded impatience, flexing his lower jaw and constantly chewing on something--most likely tobacco, but it could just as well be Plainview violently grinding his teeth, irritated at the impertinence of others getting in his way. He sees himself outside society, not within it; or better yet, he sees himself on the way out of society, boot-strap style, moving on up to something grander. There's more than a little irony then when, in his movie-ending fit of rage, he mockingly barks, "I am the Third Revelation! I am who the lord has chosen!"

Daniel Plainview is a variation on a theme present over the whole of Daniel Day-Lewis's career, that of the estranged social outsider. Sometimes the estrangement is forced; sometimes, as in Plainview's case, it is a choice (and an illusion). Often it is both. No matter what its origins, the theme of estrangement is present in literally every role he has played, from the homeless punk in My Beautiful Laundrette to the tragically out-of-touch Edwardian in A Room with a View. His first lead role as a libidinous Czech doctor in The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988) sees him banished from his country by the 1968 Soviet invasion, while Jack Slavin, Day-Lewis's character in The Ballad of lack and Rose (2005), is self-exiled, an aging idealist living out his final days on an old New England commune. In Day-Lewis's trilogy of Irish films with director Jim Sheridan--My Left Foot, In the Name of the Father (1993), and The Boxer (1997)--he plays misfits of one sort or another, not to mention the restless characters in his American pictures--The Last of the Mohicans (1992), The Crucible (1996), and the two with Martin Scorsese, Age of Innocence (1993) and Gangs of New York (2002). Estrangement appears even in his early, little seen fish-out-of-water comedies Stars and Bars (1988) and Eversmile, New Jersey (1989). Altogether these films comprise his entire body of work from 1985 to the present.

Day-Lewis is routinely reticent when it comes to discussing his roles; each, he insists, has its own particularities. "In talking a character through, you define it," he told The New York Times Magazine in 2007. "And if you define it, you kill it." Asked in 1988 to explain Tomas, Day-Lewis's character in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, the actor responded similarly, almost verbatim, to the magazine Film Comment. "Tomas? It's difficult. When you describe a character, you tend to restrict it, constrict the life of that person." Day-Lewis is unafraid to note, however, that he is drawn to characters who share this very inability to articulate. "I am much more touched by people who have difficulties with [communicating]," Day-Lewis told Rolling Stone in 1990. "To varying degrees, we're all incapable of communicating. It's the thing that causes us the most distress, which forces us to confront our isolation, our aloneness, and that's inescapable." Seventeen years later, he told The New York Times Magazine, "People who delight in conversation are often using that as a means to not say what is on their minds. When I became interested in theater, the work I admired was being done by working-class writers. It was often about the inarticulate. I later saw that same thing in De Niro's early work--it was the most sublime struggle of a man trying to express himself. There was such poetry in that for me." The inarticulate also characterizes Day-Lewis's favorite scripts. "The best screenplays I've read have been the most laconic," he told Film Comment in 1988. "It's like poetry: if someone knows how to use very few words, it's far more effective than someone who uses a great many more to say far less."

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There Will Be Blood is certainly laconic--its first twenty minutes pass by with nearly no dialog whatsoever. When Plainview meets the Sunday family, owners of the ranch he aims to buy, he approaches them with kindness--full of "please" and "thank you"--but his sincerity is difficult to gauge, because words, for Plainview, are people-movers, not vessels of the truth. Every speech he gives is obviously prepared; every spoken response is prefaced by a silent beat of careful consideration of how Plainview can best get what he wants. "He's got his snakebite remedy and he is going to sell that whatever way he can from town to town," Day-Lewis explained recently on The Charlie Rose Show. "And for a man that has lived in silence in holes in the ground for maybe years, he's now got to find a voice and a silver tongue that's got to convince people to turn their pockets inside out and invest in him as a man of irrefutable wisdom."

In some ways, Daniel Plainview emerges as a hot-blooded Western equivalent of Day-Lewis's character in The Age of Innocence, the lovelorn New York lawyer Newland Archer. In the 1993 film directed by Martin Scorsese, Archer falls for his fiance's cousin, an alluring divorcee, but finds himself absolutely unable to act on his feelings, strictly forbidden by the delicate unwritten social rules of the 1880s upper classes. Not unlike Archer, Plainview deeply harbors an emotion that is socially unacceptable to reveal, and must spend a great deal of the film talking around it, expressing it only in the briefest of looks and glances. Where Archer's face is all grins and nods for business's sake, Plainview's is the same--also for business purposes. But where Archer knows only soft expressions and good intentions, Daniel Plainview is absolutely gruff around the edges, full of scowls and furrowed brows--what New York Times critic Manohla Dargis calls "strange, contorted Kabuki-like grimaces." There is very little longing in Plainview's face--though what little there is proves very telling, as we shall see--only irritation with others for being in his way. The difference is that what drives Plainview is not, as in Archer's case, unconsummated love. It is unconsummated contempt.

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What Plainview hates more than anything else are things that are uncontrollable, namely bad fortune. The fact that people have the bad fortune of being, at bottom, uncontrollable, with free wills of their own, absolutely infuriates him. If someone is standing taller than he--economically or morally--Plainview wants to cut them down, personally. Economically, he's irked by the powerful corporate oil companies that are itching to buy him out. Morally, he's violently irritated by the young preacher Eli Sunday (Paul Dano) in whose township, Little Boston, Plainview constructs his latest oil enterprise. The more misfortunes that befall Plainview, the more impatient and resentful he becomes.

Yet when it comes to explaining himself and his own motivations, Plainview's silver tongue fails him. When he's at his most candid, Plainview can only explain he hates "people"--but that's obvious enough from how he acts. "I don't like to explain myself," Plainview complains, and he routinely attempts to compensate for his inarticulateness with bold acts. Those who can't speak, in Plainview's case, do. But acting in a world of people demands communication, or else bold acts become blunt and brutal. And There Will Be Blood is, in the end--about the time Plainview starts drooling--very brutal indeed.

Of Day-Lewis's previous films, There Will Be Blood has drawn the most comparisons to his other film with Martin Scorsese, Gangs of New York, largely due to the films' shared brutality. Whether it is throwing axes in peoples' backs or hanging common folk at the gallows for political purposes, Day-Lewis's Bill "The Butcher" Cutting stops at nothing to maintain his power. But Cutting isn't an all-out villain; he is not without his motivations. In one scene, suffering from a bout of introspective insomnia, the Butcher awakens his up-and-coming apprentice Amsterdam (Leonardo DiCaprio), proceeding to explicate on his life's ruling philosophy. Like Daniel Plainview, Cutting is wholly articulate in public, spitting Bible-styled phrases with acumen--but like Plainview, in private, at his most vulnerable, Cutting proves pithy. With a deep sigh, pause, and a terse four word seeming non-sequitur--"I never had a son"--Day-Lewis turns the murderer into a man we can understand, conveying why Cutting trusts the young Amsterdam so much, someone Cutting knows very little about--and who, it turns out, is planning to kill him.

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Daniel Plainview never has such a single, self-contained expository moment--though one scene around a campfire comes close. His moments of introspection are few and far between. Still, Day-Lewis seizes on each one as an opportunity to drag Plainview's persona out of dark villainy into grey ambiguity. Like Gangs of New York, these moments of vulnerability in There Will Be Blood are bound up with fatherhood, continuing a recent trend in the actor's work. Once, Day-Lewis was often, first and foremost, a son. In films like My Beautiful Laundrette, My Left Foot, In The Name of the Father, and even The Last of the Mohicans, his relationship (or lack of relationship) to his parents was a key aspect of the character, even if sometimes too simplistically. (4) Older as he is now, There Will Be Blood is the fifth film in a row in which Day-Lewis plays a father or aspiring father figure. In The Crucible, he labors to fix the strife of a troubled marriage in the company of his two sons, while The Boxer sees him training his old girlfriend's fatherless son at boxing. In Gangs of New York he tutored the fatherless Leonardo DiCaprio in gangs; and in The Ballad of Jack and Rose, Day-Lewis overfathered his daughter to unhealthy extremes.

Fatherhood appears to be Plainview's one project involving a relationship not strictly stipulated by contracts. Plainview later gives us reason to doubt his sincerity as a father, but early on he laughs, smiles, and communicates with H.W. too often to make the gestures disingenuous. He often proudly introduces himself and his adopted son, H.W. Plainview, as a "family business," and brings along H.W. with him wherever he goes, explaining each business move in detail. When an explosive oil fire leaves H.W. deaf, Plainview is faced with a choice between family or fortune: raising H.W. or raising "ocean's of oil" out from under the ground. Whenever Plainview suffers disappointment, Day-Lewis communicates the feeling with a series of subtle sighs; every dealing with the young H.W. after this point is one long, sincere sigh. When Plainview discusses the prospect of sending his son away with his assistant, he does so in soft tones--soft out of sadness, not discreetness--speaking his words as he exhales. When H.W. is eventually sent away, we know Plainview is making the inhumane decision, but Day-Lewis shows there's just enough humanity left in Plainview that it's a decision laced with grief.

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Soon it becomes clear H.W. was Plainview's one anchor to humanity; when H.W. leaves Plainview, Plainview's restraint leaves with him. In one scene set in a restaurant, Plainview pathetically tries to put one over on a table of oil executives, boasting of his business dealings. Day-Lewis endows Plainview with such desperation it is almost as emotionally raw as the actor's famous restaurant scene in My Left Foot, in which an anguished Christy Brown learns of his beloved tutor's engagement to another man. Only this time around, the character is not struggling for the power to express himself; Plainview is attempting to exert power over others. As the film continues, Plainview's power plays fare better, but we keep cringing. So unlike, say, The Ballad of Jack and Rose, which was also very much about the damaging ambitions of fathers, the father in There Will Be Blood is never, ever redeemed. Our immediate response is to cringe in embarrassment, not cry in sympathy.

The performance still impresses, rather than repulses, possibly because Day-Lewis shows Plainview more sympathy than we in the audience could ever possibly muster. "You have to like your character, regardless of whether you think he'll be liked by the audience," Day-Lewis told American Film in 1988. "It's very important to say that, regardless of how obnoxious any character you're playing might be, you have to feel sympathy or compassion or an enormous degree of empathy for that character." At one point, a man arrives in There Will Be Blood claiming to be Plainview's half brother. Their meeting results in opportunities for Plainview to reminisce, even to explain himself, however briefly. The smile on Day-Lewis's face in these moments creates a window into a huge, off-screen void where Plainview's past resides, question marks asking why Plainview is who he is, perhaps even how he could have been different. "The thing about performance, even if it's only an illusion," the actor once told Rolling Stone, "is that it is a celebration of the fact that we do contain within ourselves infinite possibilities. It's an admission of the fact that we contain within us other lives, that we don't have to live by rigid beliefs that one thing is right and one thing is wrong." Day-Lewis's performance shows us all sides of Daniel Plainview, all these possibilities.

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By considering the circumstances of an individual character so deeply, the best Day-Lewis performances finally bring our attention back, full circle, to society. It is probably not a coincidence, then, that so many of Day-Lewis's films are set in the past within very particular times and places. For this reason, high-school teacher Jim Cullen has written of how he uses three of Day-Lewis's films set in America--The Crucible, The Age of Innocence, and Gangs of New York--as teaching tools in the classroom due to their "remarkably textured, yet consistent, vision of American history." But Cullen also raises possible problems with Day-Lewis's American roles when he interprets what that vision entails. "The engine of American history, Daniel Day-Lewis tells us, is a restless individualist who strains against an inherited culture, an individual as likely to look back as to look forward, but an individual who, in that very restlessness, also paves the way for a new generation, one that will ultimately produce a new rebellion for a new age." Continues Cullen, "It's a little surprising to realize that in some respects the argument that Day-Lewis is making is not that much unlike the one John Wayne did in his body of work--or by broadening the frame of reference a bit to bring Alan Ladd into the picture, one might dub it the Shane school of history, where misfits with good hearts redeem and renew a country." (5)

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But this observation is only possible if one overlooks the change Day-Lewis's individuals undergo throughout their stories. Normally by the time the credits roll, his characters have achieved a certain degree of personal transcendence, not only leaving their stamp on society, but also changing themselves, reconciling with the world around them. In My Beautiful Laundrette, the ex-skinhead Johnny puts trust in his Pakistani lover; they close out the film making love. In A Room with a View, the appropriately-named Cecil Vyse summons the courage to break his chaste engagement to a woman who has found a lover of her own. The adulterous Tomas finally retires to the countryside with his wife in The Unbearable Lightness of Being; while Gerry Conlon marches out of the courthouse at the end of In the Name of the Father, triumphant and vindicated after a long legal struggle. In The Crucible, the character John Proctor famously sacrifices his life rather than admit the validity of the Salem witch hunt. Another American history film, The Ballad of Jack and Rose--which Cullen fails to mention-features what may be one of Day-Lewis's most affecting scenes, when the aging hippy Jack Slavin breaks down at the kitchen table of his capitalist nemesis, realizing the painful patriarchal mistakes he's made raising his daughter Rose, despite his communitarian ideals.

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Over the course of these films, Day-Lewis's characters have grown from irresponsible boys-in-men's clothing into new selves with a sense of accountability to others. According to Rebecca Miller, who directed Day-Lewis in The Ballad of lack and Rose, the actor consciously builds towards these moments. "Something I noticed especially when I came to cut the film is that ... the choices that he makes within a film are inevitably pushing the whole thing forward," Miller told Charlie Rose in 2005. "He's storytelling ... Although he's very much in his own world and completely inside of that and concentrated, he's also very aware of propelling the story forward, making choices that move you along." Time magazine critic Richard Schickel notes a similar quality in the actor's performance in There Will Be Blood. "It is the genius (and I use that word advisedly) of Daniel Day-Lewis's performance to slowly, patiently, show the madness replacing his former rationalism, to prepare us for the film's astonishing ending."

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At the end of There Will Be Blood, Plainview's barking and drooling takes the place of what would normally be, for a Day-Lewis character, a moment of reconciliation. The ending has divided the film's viewers. Some see it as unnecessarily breaking the sparse pace the film sets prior to the scene; others, like Manohla Dargis, find it characteristic of Day-Lewis's performance as a whole, "brilliantly located at the juncture between cinematic realism and theatrical spectacle." But few if any deny the power Daniel Day-Lewis gives to the scene, the character of Daniel Plainview, and to There Will Be Blood as a whole. It is a rare performance--not only in terms of quality, but for Day-Lewis himself. There Will Be Blood is only the fifteenth film Day-Lewis has completed in more than twenty years. This selective choice of roles is one reason they stay so good; he saves himself for the very best, and invests each role with careful consideration. But his selectivity not only indicates his skill, it also reveals recurring themes across his career, something approaching a definite, if complex, point of view. As long as Day-Lewis's performances escape cliche, so too ought the critical considerations of his work.

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End Notes:

(1) One gossipy biography published on Day Lewis combines these cliches, attempting to explain Day Lewis's "intensity" as an actor as the result of his famous father--the poet Cecil Day-Lewis--dying while Day-Lewis was still a boy; see Garry Jenkins, Daniel Day-Lewis: The Fire Within (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994).

(2) For instance, media frequently recall his training as a shoe cobbler's apprentice in Italy, but forever fail to mention his reporting on the violence of the Israeli occupation of Palestine for the organization Medecins Sans Frontieres. See Daniel Day-Lewis, "Inside Scarred Minds," The Sunday Times, 20 March 2005.

(3) It should be noted these media scripts have also benefited Day-Lewis, at least in that they have given him a great deal of success and a choice over roles to play. For an important discussion of how Day-Lewis met success where his South Asian costars in My Beautiful Laundrette did not, due in large part to racism in the industry, see Christine Geraghty, My Beautiful Laundrette (London: I.B. Tauris, 2005).

(4) For a discussion of the problematic gender roles in My Left Foot, see Ruth Barton, lira Sheridan: Framing the Nation (Dublin: The Liffey Press, 2002).

(5) Jim Cullen, "National Character: Daniel Day-Lewis, American Historian," Common-Place, July 2007, Volume 7, Issue 4 < http://www.common-place.org/vol07/no-04/school/>.