Jonny Greenwood- Music from There Will Be Blood

There Will Be Blood might be my favorite film next to The Godfather (more on that iconic score later). Daniel Day Lewis is terrifying in the role of Daniel Plainview. And he has to be, since it’s Plainview’s character that is the focus of the film. It’s a fascinating character study. I’ve watched it a couple of times now, and thought I’d learned all I could from it. But it turns out that listening to the soundtrack opened up a whole new way of looking at the film.

The opening track is a great example. It’s a simple piece of music, with a high and a low part questioning and answering each other. What it does is introduce the idea of balance. Every yin will get its yang, the left will not be seen without the right. Every beginning will have an end. And they will be symmetrical.

Thinking about this and combining it with some comments by Lewis himself, made me realize the futility of what Plainview was seeking. He was seeking to get away from people in whom he saw “nothing in them worth liking” so he made a lot of money so he could sequester himself. But it’s made clear by the opening sequence of the movie that he already had it, it’s just his tent was made of canvas and not silk. He started out as bitter miner in the middle of nowhere, and ended the same way. Every question gets an answer.

This path is not a happy one, and the music knows it. The one part of this album that sounds cheerful, or hopeful is “HW/Hope of New Fields.” In the movie, tells his father that he wants to set out on his own, make his own path. Daniel calls him a “bastard from a basket” and in general humiliates him. In doing so we hope, and the music hopes with us, that he is forcing HW onto a better path towards better fields.

4/5 This is score that functions just as well as its own piece of music as it does a companion piece to a film. It is a little sad to listen to though, as is Daniel Plainview when you step back a bit.