Asked in one of his rare interviews if his powerful There Will Be Blood is topical or allegorical, writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson, who expresses himself much better on film than to a tape recorder, said: "It's topical, because there is so much talk about oil nowadays. It's historical as well. I don't really know."

Historical the film certainly is--once Anderson randomly found the book in London and bought it to read because he was homesick and it bore an image of an oilfield in his native California (he's well known to be a San Fernando Valley boy), he saw what Upton Sinclair had done with a legend much like that of oilman Edward Doheny.

As Chris Goodwin of the London Times was told by Anderson (who scored Oscar nominations for best original screenplay, for Boogie Nights and Magnolia):

I was frustrated by the things I was writing, and had gotten sick of my own voice, and would sort of transcribe the book to see how it looked...the book's genesis was that Sinclair's wife owned a plot of land in Signal Hill [just south of LA], where they found oil, and he got to witness this explosion, how the town fell apart."

He then adapted the book's first 120 pages, losing much of Sinclair's socialist ire and scaling the story of a father and son and political corruption into somehting much more intimate and personal. (An irony is that anyone searching for an allegory could read the film as a leftist parable about the destructive nature of greed--especially around oil--and the phoniness of religion. From that angle, it's a searing critique of the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism run wild, and some will leave the cinemas muttering about the resonances with the present-day story of Arbusto (as the president's oil venture was dubbed), Cheney and Halliburton.)

Most of the film's rolling ball of positive ink is centered on the performance of Daniel Day Lewis as miner, prospector, and ultimately oil baron Daniel Plainview. In early polling, he's the cleear favorite for Academy recognitiona s Best Actor.

We begin by watching with a long skein of hard, wordless work as Plainview ferociously struggles to wrest some precious metal from a well-like hole he's dug and blasted in the earth. Once he's succeeded, it all kicks in--Robert Elswit's fifty-shades-of-ochre cinematography, Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood's smartly intrusive score that riddles ominous tones with industrial-strength percussion, Anderson's declamatory dialog and bravura camera moves, and the Day Lewis performance. Sounding undeniably like the lost son of Chinatown's John Huston (in strict terms of epoch, Plainview would be Noah Cross' predecessor), as visibly calculating as a Nixon with a slightly absurd physicality that shades at times into being one-sixteenth Borat, he's an All-American monster. An asexual, whiskey-swilling, emotionally blocked s.o.b. For whom competition is the obsessive motor and the ultimate goal is "to get away from people," he's hateful early and late. Notes Goodwin: "The actor remained in character throughout the three-month shoot, on and off the set. Which, once you've spent 160 minutes in Plainview's company, is a truly scary notion."

Yet much of the genius of the performance lies in Plainview's tangled devotion to adopted--one might better say usurped--son H.W., played impeccably by first-timer Dillion Freasier, age 10). Could someone who, unlike Day Lewis, hasn't lived with two young sons, convey Plainview's sporadic warmth towards H.W. this well? And could someone who hadn't been separated from a son (Gabriel, born to then-lover Isabelle Adjani in 1995) extrude such steely rage at the oilman who tries to use H.W.'s banishment as a negotiating ploy? Together the kid and the dad break our hearts, as their performances and Anderson's sure touch moves their story to the very center of this film.

Those who have problems with the third act ("This film is stern, unaccommodating and, finally, daft," wrote Time's Richard Corliss) may be failing to appreciate how powerfully that father and son arc concludes. As for the finale , which begins with Plainview having a Hasselhofian repast on the floor of the bowling alley (the location used is Doheny's actual mansion), dazzlingly holds its breath for the hilarious final prank Plainview visits on his spiritual adversary ( a superb Paul Dano), and then either jumps the shark (some are saying) or (I'd assert) unforgettably if brutishly completes the saga.

The New York Times' Lynn Hirschberg is not overreaching when she writes (in an illuminating profile of the somewhat self-absorbed Day Lewis), "The tale it tells is, in many ways, a story about what is right, and wrong, with America."

Thus the modest Anderson is induced to live up to comparisons to Orson Welles, telling Goodwin, "One of the great things about Citizen Kane is that it just goes downhill," he says. "There's such satisfaction in watching that."

Day Lewis learned the history--he describes the oil rush to Hirschberg as "Initially, they scooped it out of the ground in saucepans. It was man at his most animalistic, sifting through filth to find bright, sparkly things." But he's also aware of the allegory as it translates to the personal:

What it takes to get power, as you sacrifice yourself, little by little, in pursuit of the thing you thought you needed, or felt you couldn't live without, and then you only understand too late that you can't retrieve your soul - it's gone, it's torn.

It cannot have been easy to completely inmhabit the man we see shouting "Bastard in a bucket!" near the film's end. But for Day_lewis, in a fashion not totally unlike that of the man he portrays, there wasn't much choice. As he told another New Your Times reporter in 1992, "Maybe on my deathbed I'll know whether or not the thing I spent my life doing was keeping me alive or killing me. I certainly don't know now."

(Daniel Day Lewis at a There Will Be Blood screening at the Writers Guild Theater in Los Angeles; photo by Kevin Williamson/Wire Image)