Art – or much of its excitement – is about waiting for marvels. Westerners babble about the Great American Novel and when it will come, unless you’re a Moby Dick fan and believe it has already. For many, equally, the Great American Movie was signed, sealed and delivered in 1941. It was called Citizen Kane. Since then, every new pretender has been measured by its storming stature, including Paul Thomas Anderson’s wild, powerful, posturing, Oscar-nominated There Will Be Blood.

A great American film has to be about America, doesn’t it? If biology is destiny, indigenousness is authenticity. So here is the tale, very neo-Wellesian, of a self-manufacturing man, a pickaxe-to-plutocrat oil tycoon (Daniel Day-Lewis) erecting phallic symbols and coaxing black-liquid orgasms all over early 20th-century California. The film is based on Upton Sinclair’s Oil!, in much the same sense that Kane was based on the life of William Randolph Hearst. In each case the template becomes a pretext for the filmmaker to go ape on themes of greed, ambition, hubris and the American way.