Well, well, well.

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, though of course his godliness is more or less a fraud--and his great antagonist in the drama that develops. Dano gives an interesting performance, though ultimately I think he is miscast, or else the character is misconceived: He's supposed to be a faith healer and a fire-and-brimstone preacher, but he resembles Uriah Heep more than Elmer Gantry--crafty and insinuating, without any of the charisma and even sex appeal that's required from an evangelist on the make.

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This is a flaw in the film, but not a fatal one, and for a time it's overwhelmed by the mercurial energy of Day-Lewis's performance and the sweep of Anderson's vision. The oil business, with its wild landscapes and rearing wells, its pillars of oil and fire, is the world's most cinematic industry, and There Will Be Blood makes the most of it-not just in the big set-piece sequences, but in the way the backdrop of red flame and black gold and dark satanic derricks makes every intimate moment, every fragmentary conversation, seem freighted with all the terrible significance of the King James Bible.

Only a few relationships matter in the movie, and they all have a primal simplicity: the mirror-imaging of Plainview and Eli, the father-son bond between Plainview and H.W., the twinning of the Sunday brothers, and the maybe-so-maybe-not fraternal link between Plainview and his "brother by another mother" (Kevin J. O'Connor), who shows up midway through the film, drawn by the news of his supposed sibling's wealth.

The film seems to share its protagonist's jaundiced view of God: that He's "a superstition," as Plainview puts it, and anyone who says otherwise is "a false prophet." But Anderson--with an assist from Upton Sinclair, whose novel Oil! provided the loose basis for the script--has produced a story that owes an awful lot to Genesis; he's just edited Yahweh (and the women) out.

The result is a film that critics will be chewing over for years, because There Will Be Blood is made for them to chew on: It's sprawling and seething and deliberately over-the-top, elliptical and elemental, shot through with a singular vision that's visible, for good or ill, in every single frame. Whether it's a successful movie is another question, and I'm inclined to answer no. If its weakest part were its beginning, rather than its end, I might feel differently, but as it stands There Will Be Blood seems like a tragedy that skips the falling action--if it were Shakespeare, it would be missing its Act IV and half of V--and asks the audience to fill in too many blanks. I believe in where Daniel Plainview begins, I believe in where he finishes up, and I accept that the character Day-Lewis and Anderson have fashioned might remain essentially unknowable no matter what was shown happening between his beginning and his end. But I wanted more from this movie even so, and I think a true masterpiece--as opposed to this fascinating, dazzling, deeply flawed epic--would have given it to me.