Jerry Goldsmith's Postmodernism and the Year's Best Score

We can assume that there will always be Oscars to spawn debate and FSM columns. I will assume that Oscar people have their world, and I have mine. And I'd rather write about mine. There are a number of excellent new scores to savor, including Basil Poledouris' The Touch (see http://filmscoremonthly.com/articles/2003/20_Jan---Basil_Poledouris_The_Touch.asp), Elmer Bernstein's Far From Heaven, Tan Dun's misunderstood and barely heard Hero, John Williams' exquisite Minority Report -- the choices are unusually extravagant so why limit ourselves to the official selections? Furthermore, I consider the following score the very best of the last 12 months:

The Sum of All Fears. Jerry Goldsmith. Mention that name and cause a few internet people to become enraged at the predictability of a reviewer appreciating the undiminished dramatic skills of the greatest working film composer. Of this general subject regarding Goldsmith's alleged fall from his prime, all I can say is that it is nonsense. Things change through time and nothing is what it was in previous decades and we cannot go back in time. Capricorn One, Coma, Alien, Logan's Run, Papillon -- all magnificent scores of a contemporary '70s sensibility, endemic in theory and function to an era. The Satan Bug, Seven Day in May, Planet of the Apes -- as intensely realized but endemic to the 1960s. All of these scores have qualities that spoke to the world they were made in, that cut into the tissues of the time and explicated the social dynamism and psychology at work in the characters within their films, and each did it in a style supported by then-popular conventions of filmmaking. Goldsmith wrought empathy from the familiar and the extreme with coruscating aplomb and the deepest understanding of men and women. If he had to impose those qualities when the films failed to establish them, that was one of his supreme achievements performed again and again, so much we could have taken it all for granted. Lately, actually for some time now, his work presents a minimal, austere point of view, and perhaps this is mistaken for a failing by too many score enthusiasts who prefer looking to the past, who mistake style for content. If the music speaks for itself, then it might at least be allowed to say it how it chooses. Right? The Sum of All Fears states its business in a way emblematic of Jerry Goldsmith music in this time.

I find in this score precision of line that expresses no more nor less than what is required except where studio meddling dictates overstatement. If the fundament of scoring films is about getting inside the drama and resonating meaning (yes the dying art of creating meaningful things) then Goldsmith is still formidable at his game. The film is rendered structurally sound, and the movement is pushed and the emotions are accented, and the implied meaning within the situation is humanized, and tension between what is apparent and what is implied is activated, and the score is good. Somehow, pleasing CD collectors doesn't seem to be a factor. When a real gesture is made, the slightest phrase of the violins, even just a pulse, is still a vibration giving voice to something, and I believe the sum total of one's life experience is present in the music one creates. Goldsmith's experience is so rich that less is actually enough to register effectively, to incite emotional plus intellectual responses without actually having to elaborate and underline them. Certainly the orchestra musicians respond with conviction, palpably enthused on the recording. Every note has impact. Other composers get by on good behavior if it is considered cool to use certain terms, i.e., "minimalism" in conjunction with discussing someone like Phillip Glass. How do we define "minimalism"? Mikhail Baryshnikov faces similar misgivings from critics for his later style of postmodern dance, from those who wish to see flying leaps and classical ballet and amazing feats of Twyla Tharp modernity, and blame his age when he gives them something else. About his clean-lined minimalist style which he prefers, Baryshnikov has said: "Extension is not at all important. It doesn't matter how high you lift your leg. The technique is about transparency, simplicity, making an earnest attempt. That is the performer's job."

After modernism is over, it all becomes plain -- the essential elements. Transparency. That's what Jerry Goldsmith is about in the 21st Century. Finding the essence of drama. Unornamented and clean. Perhaps the cutthroat style of contemporary cinema supports only the barest gestures (witness Bernstein's familiar warm chamber style at work in the exaggerated Far From Heaven -- critics are calling it floridly retro even though it is delicate; it takes such an overstated context for emotionality to seem appropriate now). Goldsmith is always on top of the trends.

In The Sum of All Fears the classical song "If We Remember," in latin -- a solo vocalist with chorus and orchestra -- establishes the center of the score's convictions, playing out prayer-like over the credit preamble of a doomed Israeli jet releasing a nuclear device to the fates. A timeless feeling of sorrow creates an aural adjunct to the desert visuals elevating the thematic to stunning heights, on the order perhaps of Shelley's all-but-forgotten poem, Ozymandias:

And on the pedestal these words appear:
 

"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!" Nothing beside remains: round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Nothing in the remainder of the film reaches anything comparable to this moment, but the implications of the message in the song "If We Remember" (written by Goldsmith with lyrics by Paul Williams) haunt the activities to come, needling at the fringes, taking guises and then hitting with apocalyptic force when the dangers mount (the message of course is more clearly stated with the contemporary pop arrangement of the song over the end credits).

With simple phrases, a five-note low-end piano motif, a frantic surge, and furtive attacks throwing the expectation off balance, the score crafts dread more powerfully than I've heard, maybe because it is so bare in its devices, frustrated from taking overt shape by the near-misses and political aversions in the plot and, following a quietly elegant transit point that is just a resolving string figure (once the catastrophe of a nuclear conflict is avoided), finally modulated to the hopeful tone of the Remember theme when the right choices are made. Beautifully, the elements of light within the score find a threnodic expression in conjunction with the future Ryan couple, as if to say, this is what is important and what is at stake, this is what you have to lose. In present conditions, the subject matter of the plot no longer warrants the luxuries of broad entertainment value as it might have when the threat of nuclear annihilation was only a routine plot device (it wasn't at the beginning either, however, when the Cuban missile crisis was present in public consciousness); in underplaying the score's style, Goldsmith subtly transitions his m.o. away from genre and into direct address, voicing a plain warning against self-destruction. In effect, it is primarily artful music, masterfully written. There were Goldsmith scores with this kind of sparse gravity before, in the 1960s, and only the method is a little different now. As always, significant things are communicated powerfully. For this stern and also deeply-felt appeal to the future, I wish I could say thank you to the composer.

Best scores 1 through 10: The Sum of All Fears, The Touch (Basil Poledouris), Minority Report (John Williams), Hero (Tan Dun), Far From Heaven (Elmer Bernstein), Windtalkers (James Horner), Spirited Away (Joe Hisaishi, from 2001), Star Trek Nemesis (Jerry Goldsmith), The Two Towers (Howard Shore), Catch Me if You Can (John Williams)

Best films 1 through 10: Hero (Zhang Yimou), Gangs of New York, Minority Report, The Two Towers, Graveyard of Honor (Takashi Miike), Attack of the Clones, Catch Me If You Can, Spirited Away (2001), Undisputed, The Count of Monte Cristo, Godzilla-Mothra-King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All Out Attack (2001).
 

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