There Will Be Blood: (Jonny Greenwood) Extremely
unpleasant films of high refinement seem to exist for two reasons:
winning awards and making you feel terrible about humanity. Predictably,
Paul Thomas Anderson's 2007 drama,
There Will Be Blood,
accomplished both, serenaded widely as one of the very best films of its
decade. It also happens to show the worst of human nature on display,
conveying the destruction of morality by capitalism, greed, and
religious fraud as it examines the story of oil baron Daniel Plainview
at the outset of the twentieth century. Plainview discovers oil deposits
near Los Angeles and begins the long process of obtaining land,
destroying lives, and outright killing people to achieve massive wealth
that ultimately brings him no happiness. The lead performance by Daniel
Day-Lewis is the highlight of the picture, though bleak cinematography
and music also gained much praise for their disillusioning demeanor. The
movie represented the first entry in a long collaboration between
Anderson and musician Jonny Greenwood, who remains best known as the
lead guitarist and keyboardist for the rock band Radiohead. Because of
his classical training, however, Greenwood has flourished in his work
with the BBC Concert Orchestra, writing challenging string compositions
and dabbling with the theremin-like Ondes Martenot. Not surprisingly, he
carries over this style of atonality and dissonance to many of his film
scores, where they generate acclaim foremost because they are so obvious
in providing incongruent musical tones to unsettling situations on film.
Greenwood's classical and film music is rarely pleasant, and that was
the vibe sought by Anderson when searching for the right sound for
There Will Be Blood. Undoubtedly, Greenwood delivers. His score
is horrifically alienating and strikingly painful at most times, its
dissonance alternating between cold disconnection to frantic flurries or
outright aggression. Some of the music is barely audible for periods of
time, and the overall length of the work is short. It's a score that was
highly praised by Hans Zimmer in subsequent years, reinforcing the
notion that unusually disturbing atonality from an orchestra makes for
high art in film music. It suffices to say that
There Will Be
Blood is thus a polarizing soundtrack. Despite several major
nominations, the work was ineligible for Academy Award consideration
because Greenwood applied excerpts from his earlier "Popcorn Superhet
Receiver" piece to the equation.
You have to approach the music for
There Will Be
Blood in preparation for a specific mood of unyielding despair and
occasional fright. The narrative of the score is completely
non-existent, Greenwood making no attempt to develop and nurture motifs
in a way that helps convey any part of the film's plot. Instead, he
applies his ensemble as a blunt tool of emotional abuse on a scene by
scene basis. That performing group is intentionally slim, with about
half the cues performed by a string quartet with or without a piano and
the other half handled by the fuller string section of the orchestra.
There are seemingly no brass, woodwind, or percussion contributions.
Rather, Greenwood applies various techniques to the strings to give them
different performance aspects, such as the mad plucking and striking of
layers in "Proven Lands." The only exception to the ensemble restriction
seems to come in "Prospectors Arrive," where an almost synthesizer-like
effect in the treble lends a disturbing tone to slight waltz rhythms
performed by piano and minimal strings underneath. Listeners are left
grasping for any semblance of warmth in this extremely dry and
exhausting ambience. There is faint tonality that struggles to emerge in
"Oil," and "HW/Hope of New Fields" conveys the score's only consistent
melodic grace that will resemble Golden Age restraint for some
listeners. Even here, though, the tone is sparse and lacking any
redeeming characteristics outside of very basic, unhappy turmoil. Two
early cues exhibit the far ranges of Greenwood's scope in exploring
these depths of futility. The extremely minimal high string meandering
in "Open Spaces" establishes the cinematography of the picture in its
initial scene while the subsequent "Future Markets" shifts the cellos
into high gear as they ambitiously tear through Bernard Herrmann-like
figures of suspense. The barely-controlled chaos in this cue dissolves
into actual wildness by the latter half of "Eat Him by His Own Light,"
the piano and strings presenting totally discordant layers that are
emulated by the equally disturbing "Stranded the Line" late in the
score. An intellectually intriguing choice by Greenwood is the long and
simplistic crescendo in "Henry Plainview," a cue that suggests
unyielding focus but almost no complexity for the lead character.
Ultimately, there's no light at the end of the tunnel for the music in
There Will Be Blood; whereas some later Greenwood scores offer
variably tonal resolution at their conclusions, this score provides no
such release. It's an intentionally disheartening, sparsely brutal
conveyance of classical minimalism that will test your patience with its
atonal hopelessness. Expect its short album presentation to leave you as
gloomy (or annoyed) as ever.
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- Music as Written for the Film: ***
- Music as Heard on Album: *
- Overall: **
The cardboard packaging contains artwork by actor Daniel Day-Lewis that is
related to the film.
