Paul Thomas Anderson’s fascinating fifth feature film is a sprawling, period piece character study… and an elongated put-on.

Writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson has never been one to play it safe. Whereas plenty of indie directors gladly cede to a bit of formula for the security of financing, Anderson’s films have almost gotten progressively more idiosyncratic and left-of-center. That trend continues with his fifth feature film.

Whatever one thinks of it, there isn’t any apt way to characterize There Will Be Blood except as a striking work, and almost inarguably by someone of great virtuosity. Even for a filmmaker who has reveled in the heyday of the San Fernando Valley porn boom (Boogie Nights), made it rain frogs (Magnolia) and centered a story of emotional constipation and romantic bloom partially around pudding rebates (Punch-Drunk Love), this is an audacious film. It’s also a polarizing, punishing work, sure to alienate a decent portion of whatever small band of mainstream moviegoers it may woo to theaters, even as it carves out a loyal group of defenders amongst the intelligentsia.

Using the basic narrative template of Upton Sinclair’s muckraking novel "Oil!" as a jumping-off point, There Will Be Blood unfolds over the course of a couple decades, against the provocative and combustible frontier of California’s turn-of-the-20th-century petroleum boom. The story chronicles the life and times of Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis), a straight-talking but slightly amoral would-be businessman who transforms himself from a down-and-out silver miner into a self-made, independent oil tycoon raising his son by himself.

A brutal mineshaft accident busts open his nose and fractures his leg, but gives Plainview a small stake from which to start. When he taps a vein, more money follows. Then Plainview gets a mysterious tip from a strange passerby, Paul Sunday (Little Miss Sunshine’s Paul Dano), that there’s a little town out west where oil is literally oozing right up out of the ground. Sensing opportunity, Plainview sets out with his right-hand man, Fletcher Hamilton (Ciaran Hinds), and young son, H.W. (Dillon Freasier), to take their chances in dusty Little Boston, a hardscrabble community where the main excitement comes from the holy-roller church of charismatic preacher Eli (Dano again), Paul’s pious twin brother.

Plainview has a knack for saying the things that he knows people like to hear, talking about the schools, fresh bread and milk, and other goods and services that Little Boston will accrue as a result of their collective acquiescence for his development. An opportunist himself, meanwhile, Eli wants assurances that his church will see its proper share of the profits from the drilling.

The rest of the film finds Plainview growing his business and grappling with three major personal conundrums and crises — the sudden arrival of a long-lost half-brother, Henry (Kevin J. O’Connor), an oil well accident that costs his son H.W. a loss of his hearing, and a continued quiet clash of wills with Eli. As the oil wells raise Plainview’s fortunes along with those of all around him, these conflicts and others escalate, and the values of faith, community, hard work and ambition are imperiled by the corruption and deception born of “black gold.”

From its purposefully threatening title on down to the gleeful nastiness with which Plainview is imbued, There Will Be Blood feels like the first work in which Anderson has come fully to peace with the notion of evil in the world, or at least human wickedness and wanton destruction. Plainview is, to put it politely, a real son-of-a-bitch, and a man whose heart hardens further with each dollar he earns.

Anderson’s screenplay easily, and deservedly, draws comparisons to The Treasure of Sierra Madre and Citizen Kane, by way of its setting and themes — the wild, every-man-for-himself western edge of the early 20th century, and the manner in which the movie assays masculinized competition and cresting paranoia. What Anderson expertly conveys is a deceptive sense of epic scope. We scarcely leave Planeview’s side, but, thanks to some economically condensed head-butting with peers, paradoxically have a keen sense of his place in the oil industry, and the industry’s burgeoning importance to the country at large.

Similarly, There Will Be Blood’s engaging and effective evocation of early film history, and silent film in particular, is purposeful, willful — from the emphasis placed on cinematographer Robert Elswit’s gorgeous, justly lauded images to the focus on an isolated, increasingly paranoid central figure. Meanwhile, besting even Michael Mann’s Ali — which opened under the pleading, almost mournful strains of Sam Cooke’s “Bring It On Home To Me,” for seven wordless minutes — Anderson’s movie opens with a 14-minute passage in which no dialogue is spoken.

And yet, for all its superlative production design and just-so sense of order and construction, There Will Be Blood suffers somewhat from a feeling of stifling self-consciousness. The film holds one’s attention, it keeps an audience interested, at least, but it also feels both airless and maybe just a little self-satisfied, never more so than in its finale, which (over)reaches for profundity via an act of arbitrary violence.

To call the movie an intellectual sham would be an overstatement, and too harsh a critical rendering, but there is a same-note, single-dimensionality to There Will Be Blood, an anemia aped by Radiohead guitarist’s Jonny Greenwood’s score for the film — a THX test of nervous string work (particularly the track “Henry Plainview”) that, somewhat like the story as a whole, comes across as an elongated act of precious deception.

Plainview and Eli circle one another — not really enemies per se, but barely swallowed discontent bubbling in each of them — yet little changes for either man. The audience watches, meanwhile, but doesn’t deeply identify with either man, particularly once the film ducks forward in time to 1927, when Plainview’s obsessive bitterness and mistrust has calcified into performance-art-level theatricality, no matter Day-Lewis’ mesmeric charm.

There Will Be Blood could be read partially as an allegory of false prophets — of preacher-politician-authority figures who slyly trade in falsehoods, or talk out of one side of their mouth while lining their coffers with private gain. But the character of Eli, as well as Plainview’s conflict with him, isn’t really deeply sketched out enough to support a sustained vindication of this reading.

There Will Be Blood is, it seems — first, foremost and achingly so — a movie for cineastes, with less of a realized arc than an ending designed to be written about. There are far greater sins, of course, but this eminence front rings of false modesty… or perhaps just a savvy bit of financial capital raising after all.

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