There Will Be Blood

by

Jonny Greenwood

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There Will Be Blood is a great movie, a unique vision probably greater than the Upton Sinclair novel which inspired it. It would not have been as great a movie without Jonny Greenwood's music. Music deepens image, gives character to the shot, establishes the feeling. Here, dialogue is sparse; much depends on image and sound, not words. Thus this is a thoroughly cinematic movie (i.e., it shows us things, it doesn't talk us there, and in the showing, gives us meaning and feeling), the music inexorably bound in the telling, in my mind the most cinematic film of 2007. The masterful choice of the final movement of Brahms' violin concerto, used twice in the film, arguably one of the last gasps of anti-Wagner, conservative, romantic triumphalism, is perfect: "there will be blood"....... but we shall win. (For the record, Brahms didn't).

I was disturbed when I learned the Greenwood score was not nominated for an Oscar. All other nominated scores, including the very pretty, ambitious one for Atonement, sound so forgettably conventional! Subsequently I learned that Jonny's does not qualify according to Academy rules because chunks of it consist of music he had previously composed and published, never-you-mind how artfully they are worked into the film. Pity, because recognition of the highest order is obviously deserved. Director and Music Editor are also deserving of highest praise.

Greenwood is that rare breed, a thoroughly classically trained musician (and violist) who "crossed-over" to become a superb rock guitarist now perhaps coming back to his classical roots. I'm rather glad he seems to finally be firmly out of his classical closet. Jonny Greenwood deserves a statuette of some sort.