Anyone who bought a ticket to “Anna and the King” primarily to hear Jodie Foster and Chow Yun-Fat warbling “Getting to Know You” or “Shall We Dance” probably were dismayed to discover that Rodgers and Hammerstein were a no-show in this version of the classic tale. By now, these same people might also be wondering if the profitability of teen-oriented soundtrack albums — laden with prefabricated hip-hop, Top 40, country and heavy-metal songs — have forever eliminated the need for filmmakers to hire serious composers and traditional pop tunesmiths.
Well, the species may be on the endangered list, but several end-of-the-year movies offer hope for the future of music in the cinema.
“Topsy-Turvy,” Mike Leigh’s delightful re-enactment of the first staging of Gilbert & Sullivan’s “The Mikado,” already has opened in Los Angeles (and is scheduled to open in Chicago Jan. 14). Woody Allen’s light-as-a-feather comedy, “Sweet and Lowdown,” features the guitar genius of Django Reinhart. And, on New Year’s Day, Disney’s “Fantasia 2000” will marry classical favorites with spectacular large-screen animation for IMAX theaters.
Two other high-profile projects also offer profoundly entertaining musical experiences. In separate interviews, director Anthony Minghella discussed his use of jazz and classical music in “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” and David Robbins explained how he and his brother, Tim, were able to breathe new life into the Depression-era agitprop musical “The Cradle Will Rock.”
`THE TALENTED MR. RIPLEY’
“I’m obsessed with music being part of the architecture of a movie, and not some decorative event that tells you how to feel,” said Minghella, hours before his elegant adaptation of the Patricia Highsmith novel had its gala premiere. “Music can cloak what otherwise could be too embarrassing, too naked.
“It’s funny when you go to a dance club and see couples and they’re crooning the words of a popular song to each other. If they actually said those words, they’d be so appalled.”
“The Talent Mr. Ripley” follows the voyage of an impoverished young classical pianist, Ripley (Matt Damon), as fate allows him to enter a completely foreign world of affluence and Bohemian culture as practiced by several former Ivy Leaguers. Savoring la dolce vita in late-’50s Italy is such a seductive experience for Ripley that he wickedly concocts a way to assume the identity of jazz-loving playboy Dickie Greenleaf (Jude Law), and live out his life for him.
Without giving too much away, he becomes a murderer who possesses an uncanny ability to avoid being caught.
“I like the idea of being able to sustain an entire musical argument — which tells you what the film is about — even if you’re not paying attention to the movie itself,” said Minghella, also the director of “The English Patient.” “I thought about what was particular about the period, existentialism and jazz, and tried to construct an argument in the film between classicism and jazz. I love jazz, but I like Bach a great deal, and I sort of parceled out those polarized positions to Ripley, who hates jazz, and to Dickie, who loathes classical music.
“I try to make the music be a marriage broker in some way in the film. Ripley uses music for his purposes, and people tend to meet through it.”
Indeed, Ripley ingratiates himself to Dickie Greenleaf’s shipping-magnate father while impersonating a Princeton-trained pianist at a party. He wins over Dickie when he joins him on stage at a jazz club in Naples, and nearly comes undone at an opera in Rome.
“Gabriel Yared, who, in my mind, is so much the best composer of film music around, insists that music becomes a voice in the film, and not be used as mascara,” said Minghella, himself an accomplished musician. “There’s a moment in the movie when Ripley is walking down a corridor with a razor blade in his pocket, and the music at the moment is so perversely not what a conventional thriller requires. It’s lyric, it’s rhapsodic, it’s swooning, and it’s full of nostalgia.
“If you take that music away from the scene, it becomes harsh.”
Actually, in the novel, Greenleaf was an aspiring artist. Minghella saw that as being too limiting a device. “OK, Dickie was a painter, but not a very good one, so what could we do with that?” said Minghella.
Minghella said he told Yared, “Your job in this movie is to tease out Ripley’s inner being . . . you’ve got to speak what Ripley cannot speak. Ripley’s such a fantacist. He’s nostalgic for a life he’s never had.
“There’s a yearning to be chosen, to be accepted and not be in the catastrophic mess that he’s found himself in. He’s not a killer, he’s not a psychopath . . . he’s human and flawed and fragile. And the music must insist on that.”
The filmmaker, who studied photographs of be-bop-era musicians and Blue Note albums as part of his research for “Ripley,” next will tackle America during the Civil War in his much-anticipated adaptation of Charles Frazier’s “Cold Mountain.”
“Music is one of the things that most attracted me to `Cold Mountain,’ ” he said. “One of the central characters is a fiddle player, and a storyteller. . .
“The fiddler begins only knowing six tunes, but he’s forced to go beyond those six tunes. In his head and heart there are a million tunes, and he’s changed from a rogue into a much more fascinating character, one who’s able to change his own destiny.”
`CRADLE WILL ROCK’
Like Minghella, David Robbins doesn’t believe that a movie’s soundtrack should be used to manipulate emotions — unless, of course, you’re talking about the music that derives from the pairing of two masters, like Alfred Hitchcock and Bernard Herrmann, and the score practically becomes a character unto itself.
“Tim (Robbins) has always believed that if the scene, the acting and the passion of the script aren’t good enough, the music’s not going to be able to cover it up,” said David Robbins, who also collaborated with his brother on “Dead Man Walking,” “Bob Roberts” and several Actors Gang theatrical projects. “There are some times when music is appropriate for romantic scenes, but it’s always a very delicate line that he’s leery of crossing.”
“Cradle Will Rock” is Tim Robbins’ exploration of how fear of communism served to crush the New York debut of Marc Blitzstein’s “The Cradle Will Rock.” The musical, produced in 1936 under the auspices of the Federal Theater Project, extols the heroic struggles of the working class and condemns the greed of industrialists.
A lot more Bertolt Brecht than Irving Berlin, “The Cradle Will Rock” was being directed by Orson Welles and produced by John Houseman. When police enforced an order to shut down the production, the players conspired to bring it off anyway, and Robbins’ film — a five-year labor of love — describes their efforts.
“We knew that we wanted to have live performances on screen,” said Robbins. “We took the same approach with (the political mockumentary) `Bob Roberts,’ where we pre-recorded the instruments, did some scratch vocals and then re-recorded the vocals live. We wanted to capture the nervous energy and inertia of the performers because we felt it would help enhance the quality of that experience.
“Technically, it was a nightmare, but (sound engineer) Todd Maitland invented a system that allowed us to use the latest in wireless technology. Because the earpieces were too small to see — and the microphones were hidden in various pieces of clothing — we were able to capture the performances the way we wanted to.”
Normally, the soundtrack is added during post-production, so that the musical cues can be coordinated with what’s happening on screen. Tim envisioned “Cradle Will Rock” as more of a live Broadway musical, captured on film.
“This way, the music helped to serve the scene without being the score,” said David Robbins, who grew up in a family deeply grounded in the folk movement of the early ’60s. “We wanted to avoid getting over-sentimental or leading the audience in an emotional way.”
Tim and David’s father, Gil, was a member of the Highwaymen (“Michael Row the Boat Ashore,” “Cotton Fields”), Cumberland 3 and Harry Belafonte Singers. Mom Mary was a singer, and everyone learned to play the recorder for hootenannies.
“It was very natural for us,” recalled Robbins, who “rebelled” by becoming a rock musician, before turning to the theater.
A self-taught composer, Robbins was able incorporate much of the vibrancy and diversity of Greenwich Village into “Cradle Will Rock” by blending jazz and ethnic music into the musical mix.
“It was a conscious decision to have klezmer as part of this mix of ethnicities,” said Robbins. “I can’t confess to it being a conscious decision to match up with certain Jewish characters . . . it was more of a general mood.”
There are some romantic set pieces, to be sure, but much of “Cradle Will Rock” has a decided free-form feel, which is heavy on violins and bouncy percussive patterns. A special treat on the soundtrack CD is provided by Polly Jean Harvey’s lovely take on Blitzstein’s “Nickle Under the Foot” and a happy Eddie Vedder-Susan Sarandon duet on “Croon Spoon.”
“Eddie’s been a friend ever since he sang on the `Dead Man Walking’ soundtrack and album,” said Robbins. “On `Croon,’ another woman was supposed to sing with Eddie, but, when that didn’t work out, Susan was there to answer the bell. Her Betty Boop voice better suits the song, actually, and she and Eddie had fun doing it.”
How was it working with Tim, the younger brother he used to boss around?
“As adults, we’ve really come full circle, and now he finds inventive ways of torturing me,” said Robbins. “Artistically, we really get along and work well together. He doesn’t make that many movies — once every three years at best. And he always swears he’ll never do another one.
“Tim’s not afraid of experimenting and pushing the boundaries musically. But, I want to be known as David Robbins, the composer, not David Robbins, Tim’s brother. So, it’s important for me to keep working and doing projects of my own.”
