Recently, I was lucky enough to attend an advance screening for Paul Thomas (PT for the fan boys) Anderson’s new film There Will Be Blood. Being a long time PT fan I was extremely anxious about the film, especially after I heard that it was a period piece and based off of a 1927 Upton Sinclair novel, Oil!. Then I heard Daniel Day-Lewis (yes, the same guy who broke his ribs for refusing to get up from a wheelchair for months on end while filming My Left Foot) was cast as the lead and I thought, ‘well this is going to be more amazing than I could even fantasize about.’ Then I heard Jonny Greenwood scored the film. That moment was the closest I ever came to crapping my pants. By this point in 2008, if you don’t know who Jonny Greenwood is, well, I just have two words for you: In Rainbows. How, I asked myself, could these three people, each one the masters of their domain, go wrong in a three-way collaboration? Well it can’t! And it didn’t.
I have yet to be let down by PT (I’m not afraid to admit I drooled over Adam Sandler’s performance in Punch-Drunk Love) and this was no exception even as he took on a completely new format for himself to experiment with. Day-Lewis was in top form in what was most definitely the best performance of his career. The movie follows Day-Lewis as Henry Plainview, a turn of the century oil chaser, in his never-ending quest for success, to put it quite bluntly. Packed with themes of greed, power and religion it surprisingly and refreshingly has little resemblance to current events or politics. While I expected nothing but the best from these two guys, the most gratifying experience of the whole film was Jonny Greenwood’s emergence as an incredible film composer.
If you’re a die-hard Radiohead fan then you’ll know that this isn’t something incredibly new for him. He already scored 2003’s Bodysong (which I have yet to see) and was named BBC’s Composer in Residence in 2004, so he’s not new to grand orchestras either. And you (Ateasers…) can all relax and stop huffing and puffing about the soundtrack because, yes, it’s true that two of his BBC compositions, "smear" and "Popcorn Superhet Receiver," are in the film—just not in their entirety. The opening of "Popcorn" finds its way into the film quite prominently (it’s on the soundtrack as "Henry Plainview," by the way) and is an extremely haunting piece of music. It reminds me of someone scratching their nails on a chalk board. How Greenwood can create those sounds from a string orchestra baffles me, but the music’s impact is just as important to the story as is Day-Lewis’ quintessential American acting (mind you, he’s British and lives in Ireland). At first Greenwood’s music seems incredibly jarring. And it is. But that is its exact purpose. It’s the chief source of tension and really that is what is at the heart of this film: tension. Tension is everywhere, between every character, within every scene and Anderson decides to take it from the screen and make it audible. Greenwood’s score gets under your skin and doesn’t leave for over two hours, yet it’s somehow still beautiful and enthralling.
The bottom line is that this film is not only possibly Anderson’s best, but one of the best films of the last twenty years. That’s right, I said twenty years. Like past Anderson films, it may not click with many of the casual movie goers, but for the rest of us it’s nothing short of a masterpiece. Already the film has made many critics associations’ year end best-of lists for Best Picture and Best Actor for Daniel Day-Lewis (including Golden Globe nods for both) Best Director and of course Best Score for Jonny Greenwood. Jonny somehow didn’t make the cut for the Golden Globes being beat out by top competitors like Clint Eastwood (I guess they felt bad his score for Space Cowboys never got any of its deserved recognition…) but knowing that the show probably won’t go on I feel slightly better. The WGA and the AMPAA and online residuals or whatever the hell is going on, well that’s a whole other issue. But the RIAA, they can go straight to hell. That never gets old…
Anyway….The soundtrack was released Dec 18 by Nonesuch Records and the film opened in limited release December 26. I know many Radiohead fans will jump at the chance to hear anything Radiohead-related, but if you haven’t already, I implore all of you to wait and see the film first and enjoy the music as it was intended to be heard.
