The Deep End of the Ocean
Elmer Bernstein ***1/2
Milan 73138 35873-2. 9 tracks - 30:07
What a joy it is to have an ambassador of good taste score a contemporary
movie. Elmer Bernstein scored his first movie in 1950. That's when my dad
was two years old--forget about me. Nearly 50 years later, Bernstein
is still going strong, and while his career has had its ups and downs,
his inimitable style has meshed with more genres of film than most composers
could ever dream of. Like ketchup, it generally tastes the same, but it
goes on some important dishes no matter when or where you eat them.
The Deep End of the Ocean is the latest in Bernstein's ouevre
of scores for childhood. Here, Michelle Pfeiffer is a mother who suffers
the loss of her child, only to be reunited with him years later. The opening
theme has a maudlin quality that unfortunately recalls an afternoon soap,
but the album soon proceeds to classic Bernstein passages, at turns wondrous,
joyous, suspensful and sad, as pioneered so long ago on To Kill a Mockingbird.
If there's one problem, it's that this music feels alien to the social
world of children today. In To Kill a Mockingbird, the melodies
came effortlessly out of the Depression-era setting, as if they were tunes
the children themselves would sing (and actually, they do). Here, Bernstein's
gestures evoke a delicate innocence, but it feels like one the characters
themselves would not know. Either that, or the movie is little more than
a weak melodrama.
In any case, so many composers today are so bland and so boring. Just
hearing 30 seconds of a Bernstein score makes you realize that it doesn't
have to be that way. Composers should find scales, chords, colors and combinations
thereof that they make their own, and make music worth hearing. Anyone
who passes up Milan's CD solely because of its half-hour length (it's a
U.S.-recorded work, so the short running time is for financial reasons)
is an idiot--the CD ends just when it's getting boring, and so you listen
to it again.
--Lukas Kendall
MailBag@filmscoremonthly.com
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