Well, well, well.(FILM)( There Will Be Blood )(Movie review)

YOU won't find a film more self-consciously ambitious than Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood in cinemas this winter. Hailed, near-universally, as the masterpiece that Anderson's admirers have long expected him to produce, the movie certainly looks the part. At 2 hours and 38 minutes, it has the necessary heft. It has the sprawling canvas--a barren, mountainous turn-of-the-century California, whose pre-irrigation grandeur evokes the Old Testament and the Old West, D. W. Griffith and John Ford. And it has a volcanic, transfixing lead performance--from Daniel Day-Lewis, draped in a mustache and grinding out his syllables like John Huston--that conjures up a mad, bad protagonist to rival Melville's Ahab, or Orson Welles's Charles Foster Kane.

What it doesn't have, unfortunately, is a third act. Everything about There Will Be Blood, from its title to its doomy, keening soundtrack to its pseudo-Biblical trappings, promises a story that builds and builds and builds to an epic, blood-and-thunder climax. The movie's finale has blood, sure enough, but it spills out in a closing scene that's lurching and implausible--a tackedon flash-forward that leaves you feeling as if Anderson, having let his story unspool leisurely for most of the film, realized that he didn't have time for a closing movement and decided to just hit a sharp note and call it quits.

The conclusion looks particularly misbegotten in contrast with how the film begins--patiently, quietly, and mesmerizingly, in a near-silent 20-minute sequence that carries Day-Lewis's Daniel Plainview from the cramped silver mine where we first encounter him, an oversize goblin tearing at the earth from below, through his first oil strike and then the drilling accident that leaves an orphan baby as his ward. From this opening the film flashes forward, from 1902 to 1911, by which time Plainview has established himself as a well-known "oil man," rattling around the countryside in a Tin Lizzie with his adopted son H.W. (Dillon Freasier) in tow, talking townsfolk beset by poverty and greed into leasing him their newfound wells to drain. He's prospering, but he isn't yet so rich that he can afford to turn away a soft-voiced young man named Paul Sunday (Paul Dano), who promises--for a mere $500--to set Plainview on the scent of an untapped field that's bubbling up from below the Sunday family's unproductive land.

This is the last we see of Paul. Plainview pays him off and heads for the Sunday ranch, where he finds a pious farm family with a talented son named Eli (Dano, again) who appears to be Paul's twin--though of course the oil man, pretending to have stumbled on the ranch by accident, is in no position to ask. Dano has a strange and arresting look, like a clay statue taken too early from the kiln, with a soft face and a weak nose and an odd, malleable cast to his skin. His Eli is a preacher, with a hardscrabble start-up parish called the Church of the Third Revelation, and he's set up to be Plainview's foil--God to his Mammon, ...