After the steamy funk of Boogie Nights and the Aimee Mann tearjerkers of Magnolia, PT Anderson's new film basks in heady strings and wonky harmoniums, scored by regular collaborator Jon Brion. It's deliberately dizzying and disorientating, and not always pleasurable. But the borrowing of Nilsson's "He Needs Me" from Altman's Popeye, sung with sugary desire by Shelley Duvall, is inspired. Waiting to interview Anderson in a hotel lobby recently, I congratulated Emily Watson on her singing of this. It's the only thing I've ever said to Emily Watson.
Underwhelmed as we are by franchise McBlockbusters, this score's by the really rather talented Howard Shore, who was responsible for the coolly sexy sounds which rippled under David Cronenberg's Crash. His soppy strings for the first Baggins movie won him all manner of awards and made the UK Top 10. This one is distinguished by its remarkable guest vocalists: Iceland's Emiliana Torrini and former Cocteau Twin Elizabeth Fraser—from "Pearly-Dewdrops' Drops" to Gollum and Samwise: it makes a kind of sense, no?