So this movie gets associated with No Country for Old Men a lot, inasmuch as they’re both westerny sorts of things by respected directors that came out in the same year. But this is a vastly, vastly better movie. Also difficult to talk aboot without being pretentious, because it’s that sort of movie.

Anyway, though, it has a beginning reminiscent of 2001. Not in the sense that there are apes in it, but in the sense that it’s a stark and silent landscape interrupted by bursts of visceral action all set to a spare soundtrack of dissonant strings. And speaking of the strings, it turns oot the music (except for a bit of Arvo Pärt’s Fratres in the middle, and Brahms at the end credits) is written by Jonny Greenwood, who apparently is a member of The Radio Heads. But it’s not rock ‘n’ roll music like the Radio Heads play, it’s… well, because of 2001, Ligeti is the guy who comes to mind, but Greenwood mentions Penderecki in interviews, and yeah, it sounds a lot like that. It’s one of those soundtracks that elevate a movie, anyway, is my point.

So yeah, you’ve got these starkly cinematic visuals with starkly dissonant strings and then walking through the whole thing is Daniel Day-Lewis in an intensely wound role, and it’s ultimately a sort of epic character study. In a way, it’s kind of the anti-Magnolia. Magnolia was this giant sprawling mess, with dozens of characters and unrelated intertwining plot lines and grand emotional moments and over-the-top archness and then a rain of frogs. But There Will Be Blood is about one guy in (for the most part) one place, and his family and his work, and it’s just stripped down to that essence.

And I think it’s great, but at the very least it’s the sort of movie that’s going to percolate for a while.

(As a side note, I Rhapsodied up some of the Radio Head’s songs to see if maybe they were any good after all, but I can’t get past the whiny vocals. I also listened to Greenwood’s “Bodysong”, which appears to be an album he composed himself, and it’s pretty meh. My conclusion is that while his score was great, there’s a difference between writing heavily derivative incidental music for a movie and writing stuff that’s independently worth listening to.)