Mighty books, Herman Melville reminds us in "Moby Dick," demand mighty themes, a dictum that the makers of "There Will Be Blood" and all the reviewers gushing over the movie might keep in mind. Although advertised as an epic by its publicity machine, making it easy for the useful sycophants of the media to invoke the term, the film really only qualifies for that designation through its enormous length and deliberate pace, creating an empty amplitude, a large space without much significant action or thematic grandeur.

Adapted from a book by Upton Sinclair, the movie, which takes place in the early 20th century, tells one of those familiar American stories, the rise of an ambitious man to great heights of wealth and power, who pays for his accomplishment with the coin of his soul. Daniel Day-Lewis plays Daniel Plainview, an independent mining engineer who learns of a rich source of oil near a hamlet called Little Boston, in California. There he purchases land from a young, presumably self-ordained preacher named Eli Sunday (Paul Dano) who runs the Church of the Third Revelation, with a specialty in casting out devils.

The film follows, very slowly, the progress of Plainview's fortunes, as he and his crew drill a number of successful wells and bring in a series of gushers. It also follows the intermittent conflict between Eli and Daniel, as each attempts to outwit the other; Eli wants Daniel to pay for the construction of a new church, and Daniel simply wants more land and more oil, without the burden of living up to any agreement. In revenge for Daniel's insults, deceptions, and falsehoods, Eli forces him to undergo a humiliating public confession and baptism, an act that Daniel himself avenges at the end of the picture.

Daniel speaks often of his dislike for humanity, and indeed the protagonist of this alleged epic seems motivated as much by sheer misanthropy as by greed. His young son (and partner, as he says), the 11-year-old H.W. (Dillon Freasier), represents his one soft spot, the only person he loves; when H.W. is deafened by a mine explosion, he sends the young boy away to school, in effect abandoning him. The act amounts to the first step in a gradual process of isolation and alcoholic insanity that alienates everyone he deals with and ultimately determines his fate.

The director spins out his essentially simple, linear story at great length, taking an inordinate amount of time to cover a series of mostly minor details in a puzzling mixture of obvious, heavy-handed repetition and opaque allusion. Despite that length and a structure based on events plodding after each other in dull and solemn lockstep, the narrative unfolds clumsily and haphazardly, signaling changes in dates with incongruously Gothic lettering on the screen and omitting large chunks of important action. It takes the director so long to arrive at his point that his picture fizzles out rather than attaining some sort of meaning in its conclusion.

The movie suffers from a number of troubling problems, most of them apparently the fault of the director, Paul Thomas Anderson, the man who, lest we forget, gave the world "Boogie Nights." Its loud, insistent, discordant score, for example, often drowns out the dialogue when it isn't simply filling up time while the camera pauses in one of the innumerable long shots of the arid vistas of the oil fields.

Daniel Day-Lewis occupies the center of just about every scene, even every shot in the picture, and that much exposure of an entirely static, basically incomprehensible, and utterly unlikeable character over two and a half hours becomes unbearable - some things an audience should not have to look upon. As Plainview he refines the snarling, sneering posturing of his character in the also long, dull, and repetitive "Gangs of New York" into something a degree or two less ridiculous, but retains the nasty narcissism that mars so many of his performances.

Both his acting and the movie test the endurance of the human spirit for sheer inanity and wretched excess. 

There Will Be Blood

(R), directed by Paul Thomas Anderson

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