Oil is thicker than blood

Paul Thomas Anderson becomes California's certified cinema poet laureate with There will be Blood, his masterful account of the state's oil boom at the turn of the century.

If There will be Blood represents a reach back into time for a film-maker whose canvas has always been contemporary, it is also an ambitious leap ahead, proving that Anderson is an artiste of unlimited range and confidence.

Oil flows with viscous promiscuity throughout a sweeping epic of enterprise, aspiration, greed and hubris.

But blood provides a constant subtext in this audacious and classical portrait of California's founding and, by extension, the forging of the American identity.

What better backdrop than the harsh, unforgiving edge of a country to explore the shadowy boundaries of its deepest anxieties and most febrile dreams?

The man in whom those warring impulses dwell is a prospector named Daniel Plainview, who as the film opens is mining for silver in 1898.

Played by Daniel Day-Lewis (who won the Oscar for the role), Plainview is a man of single-minded focus, formidable physical fortitude and roiling ambition.

He's also a man of few words. The film's first several minutes transpire in almost complete silence, broken only when Plainview spies a bit of ore and whispers, “There she is''.

Plainview swiftly becomes an uncommonly transfixing character, all the more captivating for his near-total inscrutability, whose view becomes increasingly occluded by almost pathological misanthropy and self-deception.

Wit and wile

But before he turns into a monster of power-mad loathing, Plainview gives viewers one of cinema's great anti-heroes, a man of crafty wit and wily street wisdom, who at his best personifies American pluck, ingenuity and gritty self-reliance.

When Plainview discovers oil in one of his mines, he swiftly turns to that profession, transforming himself from a wordless loner to a slick salesman, convincing newly minted Californians to lease their land to him.

He's helped by his adopted son, H.W. (Dillon Freasier), who was orphaned when one of Plainview's men died in an accident.

The relationship between Plainview and his son — characterised by devotion, utilitarian practicality and, finally, betrayal — is just one of the film's fraught dynamics.

The story also pivots on Plainview's encounter with the Pentecostal preacher Eli Sunday (Paul Dano), whose theatrical pietism may be the only force greater in its ambition than Plainview's adamantly secular avarice.

Watching these two master manipulators as they one-up each other is just one of the pleasures of There will be Blood, which, despite its vivid period setting, bursts with contemporary political relevance.

Things get even muddier when a mysterious party appears on the scene, claiming a long-lost connection with the socially isolated Plainview.

But the plot twists are probably the least interesting thing about There will be Blood, which Anderson adapted, very loosely, from Upton Sinclair's muckraking novel Oil!

What makes this one of the best films of the season is its commitment to pure cinema — in the gorgeous cinematography of Robert Elswit and in the stunning score by Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood.

Energy at its heart

Anderson's vision of the new American West bursts with the energy that so fiercely drives the man of action at its centre.

And when Plainview finally does speak, it's with the exhilarating vernacular flourishes of the era, whether he's delivering a sermon to some small-town landowners about bread and family or hungrily scanning an oil-rich landscape and asking, “Can everything around here be got''?

That is the only question that drives Plainview, who by the third act has become a far less compelling character — his contradictions having calcified into grotesque artefacts of mendacity and greed.

Arguments will ensue after the film's bizarre final scene, when the title finally comes to extravagant fruition.

But for all its hyperbole, that symbolic showdown makes its own insane kind of sense, anticipating yet another California boom, when fame would be harnessed to fortune in colonising the American dream, when the bread Plainview once so floridly promised would prove just a little less seductive than circuses.