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COPYRIGHT 2008 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
There may be no scarcer commodity in modern Hollywood than a distinctive and original film score. Most soundtracks lean so heavily on a few preprocessed musical devices--those synthetic swells of strings and cymbals, urging us to swoon in tandem with the cheerleader in love--that when a composer adopts a more personal language the effect is revelatory: an entire dimension of the film experience is liberated from cliche. So it is with Paul Thomas Anderson's movie "There Will Be Blood," which has an unearthly, beautiful score by the young English composer Jonny Greenwood. The early scenes show, in painstaking detail, a maverick oilman assembling a network of wells at the turn of the last century. Filmgoers who find themselves falling into a claustrophobic trance during these sequences may be inclined to credit the director, who, indeed, has forged some indelible images. But, as Orson Welles once said of Bernard Herrmann's contribution to "Citizen Kane," the music does fifty per cent of the work.
The movie opens with a shot of dry, bare Western hills. Then we see a man prospecting for silver at the bottom of a...
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