There Will Be Blood is a compelling study of a man obsessed by greed, competition, and the unnamed demons of his past. It’s an early chapter in the story of the dominion of oil over the American economy. It’s a profile of a Christian evangelist as tainted as the oilman by lust for money and power. And perhaps it’s an allegory of the greed of the oil corporations, evangelists, and politicians of today.

In the character of Daniel Plainview, There Will Be Blood fictionalizes the story of the oil baron Edward L. Doheny, who in the 1920s bribed the Secretary of the Interior, Albert B. Hall, for secret noncompetitive leases to drill the national oil reserves in California. The infamous Teapot Dome scandal that resulted landed Hall in prison -- he was the first Cabinet member ever to serve time -- but Doheny was cleared of all charges. The muckraker Upton Sinclair told Doheny’s story in his 1927 novel Oil!, which inspired writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson’s screenplay.

Daniel Plainview, played with intense focus by Daniel Day-Lewis, is a ruthless fraud about whom nothing is in "plain view" to the ranchers from whom he beguiles their oil-rich land. That he adopts an orphan baby son in order to present himself as a "family man" is especially ironic, given his misanthropy. "I built up my hate little by little until I hated everyone," he says. It is only this son who comes to see him plainly, accompanying him whenever he visits a ranch family to swindle. Plainview calls his son "H.W.," a name that brings to mind the two Bush presidents, also sons of oil men. George H. Walker, maternal grandfather of George H.W. Bush, was the head of the family line and a financier in the era in which the film is set. He dealt in World War I contracts, and ran the exploitive railroad that Plainview circumvents by building his own pipeline to the coast.

The boy actor Dillon Freasier plays H.W. with uncanny subtlety. In a scene in which Plainview tricks the rancher Abel Sunday (David Willis) into accepting a price for his land at a small fraction of its actual worth, the slight movement of Freasier’s eyes, in an otherwise expressionless face, tells us he’s begun to question his father. When Plainview’s first oil well erupts, H.W. is too close to the explosion and loses his hearing. Plainview tricks him by abandoning him on a train that takes him to a school for the deaf. H.W. never trusts his father again.

The self-ordained preacher and healer Eli Sunday, as oily a fraud as Plainview himself, suggests the historical Billy Sunday, the very rich, very sensational evangelist of the 1920s. In a scathing account of Billy Sunday, Upton Sinclair recounts John D. Rockefeller’s donation of $200,000 to Billy Sunday to preach against unionizing to "the wage-slaves in Rockefeller’s oil-factories." The film’s Eli Sunday lifts himself from his humble ministry in a small California church to celebrity as a radio evangelist, but comes begging to his nemesis, Plainview, when the Depression costs him his "investments." The fixating Paul Dano plays Paul Sunday, who first approaches Plainview to sell him directions to his family’s oil-rich goat ranch. When Plainview arrives at the Sunday ranch, there sits Paul Sunday, who now introduces himself as Paul’s twin brother, Eli, the preacher -- who happens to want money for a bigger church. Eli is a Christian all right, obsessed with the sins of others, who beats and humiliates his own father for allowing Plainview to swindle the family. In There Will Be Blood, one scene is as intense and surprising and painful as the next.

Although more than two-and-a-half hours long, the film hurtles ahead, gaining momentum as Plainview descends into alcoholism, isolation, cruelty, and brutality. The cinematography is beautiful. In wild night scenes of oil fires, satanic, oil-smeared faces loom up to the camera. There are extended, tight close-ups of Plainview’s crazy, hate-filled eyes, and long-held wide shots of the same stark Texas hills seen in No Country for Old Men. To see There Will Be Blood on the wide screen and to hear it through the many speakers of a good theater is to be completely engrossed in it. Critics unanimously praise the ominous, disturbing music of Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood, but there are also the minimalist music of Estonian composer Arvo Pärt, as well as Brahms’s Violin Concerto. But I found the score jumbled, the beauty of the separate pieces notwithstanding.

The final scene culminates in a deadly contest between the evangelist and the oilman. When it’s over, Plainview looks up at his startled butler and announces, "I’m finished." He has estranged, robbed, or murdered anyone who might have mattered to him. Like Chigurh in No Country for Old Men, Daniel Plainview is deadly and evil, but what is most terrifying about him is that he is without motive. Superb acting, spellbinding cinematography and score, a compelling screenplay, and a brutal 158 minutes to get through. Don’t miss it.

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