there will be blood: or how jonny greenwood stole the show
well what should have been a gushing jizztorrent of filmmaking has in fact turned out to be a bit of a prostate damaged weak stream.
it opens promisingly enough with no dialogue, just pure physical acting for the first fifteen minutes from daniel day lewis (one of two exceptional things about the film), as we see plainview start his oil enterprise. indeed the first hour and a bit is filled with this kind of confident, powerful artistry.
it has the western staples of the birth of modern america: the ugliness, the risk, death, the unlimited potential. it’s a bit treasure of the sierra madre with grand guignol tones.
the scene is set for a tale of good versus evil, or more accurately power versus power. tension builds between religion, oil and capitalism (ooh see the modern parallels) and then like the man himself it all unravels.
the plot, the motivation, the characters fall apart, to the point of incoherency. it drags, plods and meanders nowhere in particular towards it’s citizen kane denouement. what was huge and expansive becomes overcooked and melodramatic.
oh yeah and where’s the goddam blood?
the second exceptional thing is jonny greenwoods score. unlike the recent cave / ellis movie contributions which sound not unlike their day jobs, this is a bit of a departure from greenwoods regular gig. i imagined a cold mountain-esque soundtrack of traditional and period music. which is kindof what you get but with atonal horror movie strings and scrapings which combine well with the unsettlingly sinister nuances present for the first hour.
it’s chamber music (percussion and cello heavy) as influenced by gyorgy ligeti. spare, disonnant, beautiful, haunting, ugly. much like the better parts of the film.
it also includes cello and piano transcription of fratres by arvo pärt and the third movement from brahms’s violin concerto.
if the soundtrack’s purpose is to marry music to image greenwood does this with remarkable consistency. the strings are uncoiling wire like daniel plainviews mind, the musical unease burbles beneath the surface like the much coveted black stuff. the score as spare and grimly inexorable as the unforgiving landscape itself.
