The Devil's Very Own Bagpipes

by Doug Adams, The Voice of Reason

Welcome to Film Score Daily, everybody. Since FSD promises to be the very best way to get information and discussion out on a semi-immediate basis, I thought we could start things off here by looking at one of the scores from this spring: James Horner's The Devil's Own.

First off, I am not a fan of this score. I think I can say that with out riling too many people because this is not the type of score people usually gush over. It's not some sweeping, lush orchestral landscape which is, I guess, what most collectors seem to be into these days. And Horner being Horner, there seems to be a built in plagiarism controversy—Brahms this time, if memory serves me—which I'm not even going to touch. I'm not really interested in that angle anymore. If Horner wants to play Guess What's In My Disc Changer, I don't think anything we say is going to change his mind. What I am interested in, however, is the "ethnic score" angle. (I know, I know, "ethnic score" is not technically a correct term, everything has an ethnicity, but everyone knows what I mean, right?) In Devil's Own, Horner is doing yet another of his takes on Irish music. Whenever Horner does these pseudo- ethnic scores he always seems to approach them the same way. If it's an Irish score, he just diverts us with some pipes or whistles playing folksy melodies before returning to his "real" palette of strings and block chords. The ethnic stuff and the non-specific score never are reconciled with one another. It seems to be saying, "And now a word from our setting." Or, it feels like a throw away reference, like one of those Indiana Jones-precursor adventure serials where you see a map and hear a snippet of some local instrument to reinforce the setting, then it's back to the score. It works fine in that kind of movie, but in The Devil's Own the Irishness is basically what the whole film is about in a round-about way. Nobody wrote dialogue for Brad Pitt's character (doing a surprisingly good accent) where he makes little references to the blarney stone so that we have something simplistically Irish going on. Why does the music treat us in that same stultifying way where the Irish parts are not really part of the score, but just some separate musical thread designed to help poor memories.

So, what's a good Irish score? Well, let's look back a few more months to Elliot Goldenthal's Michael Collins. Michael Collins, like Devil's Own, was an okay movie—not great, but not embarrassing either. It felt to me like half the plot was missing, but now I hear that the European version was considerably longer, so maybe it was! Anyway, Goldenthal's score is dead-on in creating an Irish element within the score that still has something to do with the whole. When Goldenthal uses his Uileann pipes he doesn't just do some little jig, he turns them into an extension of his orchestra. They get to play these wild minimalistic runs which break away from the orchestra and overlap each other chaotically. No one watching this film or listening to this score is going to miss the obviously Irish implications in this instrument, and Goldenthal knows it, so he doesn't bash us over the head with redundant subtext. The color of the instrument is enough to engender the desired response, so instead the pipes are allowed to participate in the score and make a chase scene a bit more exciting and colorful. And to return the favor, he later uses the standard symphony orchestra in a decidedly Irish way during "She Moved Through the Fair." It's obviously an Irish melody, it's obviously being sung in a folk singer's style, so instead of putting it over the top with more ethnic instruments, Goldenthal uses his string section on some dense droning chords which breathe with the singer and give the impression of the bellows on bagpipes. It's pretty striking if you listen closely.

Another great score for ethnic balancing is Jerry Goldsmith's Pappilon (1973). The film here is actually pretty good, though it's overly long and the last segment where Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman reunite after five years in solitary confinement (it's a prison escape film) is pretty silly. It's also one of the most strangely spotted films I've ever seen—almost all of the score is confined to one sub-plot three fourths of the way through the film. The music does show up in other areas of the film, occasionally, and Goldsmith is required to represent three different ethnic groups during the course: French for the characters, South American for part of the setting, and Columbian for some native extras. Well, the natives get little more than one of those throw away references, which is fine because they're only in a tiny section of the film. But, listen to the French and Hispanic music—it's often the same theme just in different orchestral settings. And as a matter of fact, that theme (the main theme) isn't always used in these veins, anyway; it's just as often played without any ethnic specifications. I think that one of Goldsmith's best traits as a composer is the way he doesn't overload himself with themes—he just writes flexible ones and uses them however he needs them.

So, why is this good and something like Devil's Own not? Because, a film score needs to have at least some sense of continuity. Some sections can be unrelated, but there needs to be an overall continuousness to it. Without this, it splits the intentions of the picture far too thinly. A score that keeps breaking away from the drama to do cutesy folk music cues will eventually destroy the focus of the film. Especially in films like the films we're talking about here, the ethnicity and the plot are not supposed to be thought of as separate elements—they're interrelated.

I'm actually glad that Michael Collins came out within the last year, because I was having a hard time thinking of good ethnic scores from the last few years. Most fans loved The Ghost and the Darkness, but I did not. Other factors aside, I thought that the Irish melody with the African percussion was a great idea done very poorly and in a way that dumbed down two styles of music that are often much more interesting than they were here. I also didn't like the way the chorale theme was used almost exclusively for these lovely African vistas. According to the story, Africa can be a very dangerous place. So does the cinematography and score keep showing us its beauty just to be politically correct, or because they were afraid of shooting on location and not getting any pretty landscapes on film? I already knew Africa was beautiful, this was the wrong movie to remind me.

I guess Far and Away was also a recent Irish score (why are there so many Irish movies?), but the movie was too dumb to care how good or bad John Williams' score was. Goldsmith's Under Fire is another great South American score. So is Jerry Fielding's The Wild Bunch. Check these out!

Next week—Alan Silvestri's Volcano... unless I change my mind.

Comments? Questions? Ideas? Doug Adams can be reached at DAdams1127@aol.com