haunting images, haunting score

Rating: 8/10 (27 January 2008)

There Will Be Blood is a strong movie in virtually every area, but what impressed me most of all was Jonny Greenwood's score. As in Jaws, and perhaps even more so in this case, the music creates an atmosphere of suspense that no combination of writing, acting, scenery, costume, makeup, etc. could come close to achieving in its absence. Greenwood's (usually) minimalist post-modern orchestral score sets such a tone from the opening seconds of the film, as we see the early struggles of our antihero, Daniel Day-Lewis's Daniel Plainview. We watch a man driven by an unquenchable greed and hear a swell of strings foreshadowing the decades of suffering that his greed will impose (on himself and on anyone in whom he sees an opportunity for advantage).
The character of Plainview is not a depiction of a pure psychopath, in the way that Javier Bardem's Anton Chigurh was in No Country for Old Men. He is a bit more nuanced, but the glimpses we are given into the fact that Plainview does in fact possess a capability for regret, sadness, and empathy make him that much less likable for his repeatedly ignoring such feelings in the quest to fill his pockets. Here is a man not to be crossed, and one whose protean unpredictability leaves all but his essential business associates ever at risk of crossing him should they happen to encounter him on the wrong day.
The use of religion by the oil man and of the oil man by religion makes for one of the most interesting elements in the story line. Apparently the two were even stranger bedfellows in the days before Newt Gingrich's neocon revolution. One wonders what Upton Sinclair (socialist author of the source work) would have made of the current U.S. administration, or rather, one hardly needs to wonder. Naturally, at the time of its writing the source work (Oil) was a criticism of the big business syndicates of Sinclair's day, but you know, the less things change the more they stay the same; and if I were to attempt an exegesis on There Will Be Blood it would be to make a case that Paul Thomas Anderson intended explicitly (though not exclusively) for the film to remind us of some of the less honorable practices of the current administration. Perhaps I'm reading too much into it, but this is certainly the impression that I got.
Anyway, back to the manifest content of the film -- I awoke the day after having watched There Will Be Blood with a handful of very vivid images left over in my mind, scenes of destruction and ruin, not bothered by them so much as impressed with the movie's ability to occupy my thoughts in so vivid a manner. Anderson, Day-Lewis, and Greenwood each deserve a round of applause for what they've done here. By their efforts, they have given us a movie that will be well-remembered decades hence.