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| Horner |
A Beautiful Mind: (James Horner) The darling of
Academy voters in the holiday season of 2001,
A Beautiful Mind is
loosely based on Nobel Prize winner John Forbes Nash, Jr. and his battle
with schizophrenia. Director Ron Howard's fascination with telling human
tales against a historical backdrop hit the jackpot with this film,
praised across the board for its intelligent script (despite, as in
Apollo 13 and
Frost/Nixon, taking some dramatic liberties
with facts) and its engrossing acting performances. The film is mostly a
love story, using Nash's disease, his brilliance at mathematics, and his
code breaking for the government as obstacles to his relationship with
his wife, and, for that reason alone,
A Beautiful Mind's appeal
is universal. Another aspect of the film's success was James Horner's
score. The composer's collaborations with Howard have inspired some of
his most powerful music, and
A Beautiful Mind stands alongside
those strong works despite its inherent problems relating to Horner's
methodology. Criticism over the composer's borrowing of motifs from
classical composers, overshadowed by his own repetition of ideas from
previous works, had come to the forefront of discussions about him in
2001, due largely to his extremely derivative score for
Enemy at the
Gates earlier in the year. Regardless of this ongoing problem,
Horner had positioned himself well going into the awards season of 2001;
while
Windtalkers had been delayed due to the 9/11 attacks, he
still offered music for
A Beautiful Mind and
Iris that
appealed to arthouse crowds. Contributing to his success in this area
was his choice to emulate John Williams' tactic of employing a famed
soloist for his works, featuring a standout voice or instrument with
which the composers were attempting to give their recordings a unique
edge. For
Iris, it is acclaimed violinist Joshua Bell (whose work
for John Corigliano on
The Red Violin garnered award recognition)
who set the tone. For
A Beautiful Mind, which hit the stores on
album a month before
Iris, Horner chose the haunting voice of
then 15-year-old opera phenomenon Charlotte Church.
Inviting noteworthy guest performers had been the
highlight of Williams' 1990's maturation, but Horner's continuously
strengthening reputation in theatres and music stores by 2000 had thrown
him the same consistent opportunities to draw top of the line talent to
compliment his works. Intriguingly, Horner's movement towards such solo
emphasis per score would throw a glass of cold water in the face of the
negative critics of Horner's consistency in instrumentation and thematic
verse, despite the fact that the underlying constructs were still
distinctly from his own style. The use of Church's name and voice in
A Beautiful Mind is handled in a far more professional fashion
than the highly debated, concurrent use of new age artist Enya in Howard
Shore's
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. The
appearance of Enya in the other score came across to many fans as a
publicity stunt, as it should, because her voice was used for only a
sliver of the
The Lord of the Rings score (and even then it was
inserted with an easily identifiable break between Shore's and Enya's
recordings). This is not the case with Church for
A Beautiful
Mind. While the packaging for the score's album emphasized Church's
lovely, though short song on the product, her voice carries several
sections of underscore with its haunting and ageless qualities. One of
the attractions of that voice is that it leaves you wondering, because
of its tone, if you are listening to a child or an adult. That exact
combination of innocence and mature vocal development contributed to
wild excitement over her initial albums, and in
A Beautiful Mind,
that inflection functions beyond all expectations. Interestingly, that
timeless quality of her performances works stunningly well when she
performs without lyrics, especially in relation to the addressing of
Nash's child-like innocence in the softer side of his personality. Her
appearances in the underscore are limited to a handful of tracks, but
the excellent mixing of her heartfelt tone sets an otherwise typical
Horner score apart from his other string-heavy, melodic efforts of the
era. She unselfishly blends into the massively-conceived orchestral
performances as merely one fluid element, ultimately making the vocal
presence in
A Beautiful Mind a more poignant subtlety than uses
of the female vocals in more pop-oriented scores.
In terms of the overarching style of the score, you can
simply state that if you are disturbed by the infamous "Horner
self-ripoff technique," then don't bother with
A Beautiful Mind.
At times, the similarities between his scores are too blatant for even
Horner supporters, such as a seemingly "composed on the same day"
melodramatic sound of
Bicentennial Man and
Deep Impact.
There are countless previous efforts in Horner's career that could be
cited as having directed the movement of this work, but essentially,
A Beautiful Mind is a score of two primary halves (a logical move
given the main character, of course), both of which reminiscent of
previous scores in his career. The part of the score with the most
airtime is the turbulent, but dramatic love theme for Nash and his wife,
with the prototypical Horner drama progressions that become the basis
for Church's song performance in "All Love Can Be." This theme doubles
as the identity for Nash himself, creating a sympathetic tone for a
character that desperately needs love and care. The other part of
A
Beautiful Mind is both its main attraction in terms of style and
detraction in terms of originality. When Nash's mind becomes lucid and
he engages in his flashes of brilliance, he is accompanied by a dancing,
creatively jumbled, and percussively diverse series of shifting
progressions that form a very distinct (though remarkably singular)
motif that Horner collectors heard in fragments in
Sneakers and
Searching for Bobby Fischer before it flourished in the opening
cue of
Bicentennial Man. This motif is one of the truly
distinguishing trademarks of Horner's career, and he expands upon the
idea for extended periods to accompany Nash's mind in this score. With
an enthusiastic set of pianos leading the way, this frenetic style of
development builds momentum through the constant shifting of key while
maintaining enough pleasant, major-key harmonies to establish the idea as
a theme in and of itself. It's a complex dance of the orchestra,
allowing a single rhythm to be passed from section to section with a
remarkably inspirational and upbeat tone. Substitute Church's voice for
the trumpets and woodblocks in the
Bicentennial Man cue and you
get a more delicate, elegant version of that motif (though the bass
strings are mixed so heavily this time that they drive more power into
the idea).
The four or five applications of this calculated
rhythmic idea in
A Beautiful Mind, despite reprising key shifts
heard several times before, are easily the highlight of the work,
gravitating towards the earlier portions of both the film and score. The
score's more dramatic half defies the orchestral dancing of the
mathematical genius of Nash, and the troubled self-discovery process
that nearly derailed his run to the Nobel Prize is handled in a much
more introverted way by Horner in the conversational underscore for the
picture. The painful and tragic inner-travels of Nash are tackled with a
heavy and broad string approach, leading to several very lengthy cues of
meandering and borderline depressing cues of a seriousness that Horner
employed often in
Deep Impact and
Bicentennial Man. While
pleasant to the ear, these cues extend for long sequences that may lose
the interest of the listener after several minutes. The magic of
Church's voice from the cues of mathematical triumph is replaced by
solemn solo woodwind instruments for these dark passages. With the
basses still mixed heavily, the cues offer a formidable, though
consistent tone of gravity. Although it may cause some awkward moments
in the listening experience, Horner's choice to expand upon the "dancing
key shifting" motif was a remarkably astute one to represent Nash's
brilliance, because there could be no greater a contrast than between
that and the broad bass string brooding that Horner was probably going
to employ for the darker half of
A Beautiful Mind anyway. The
precision with which the piano spurts its measures and the percussion
taps in tingling, metallic shades creates a sort of electricity that
seeks to match connections in the brain while Church's voice offers an
elegant sense of beauty to Nash's abilities. This technique in the more
subtle "Playing a Game of 'Go!'" may be faintly reminiscent of
Apollo
13 and several other Horner scores, but it's packaged here in
perhaps the best form ever to be heard. On album, it may be a little
disappointing to hear the rambling fun of the orchestra suddenly cease
without warning (which it usually does) and delve into the depths of
despair, but if you think about the personality of Nash, it's not only
appropriate, but clever as well. The superior mixing of the score, as
mentioned before, is alone a good reason to forgive Horner for his
regurgitation in this circumstance.
Ultimately,
A Beautiful Mind is, despite its
inherent flaws in repetitive constructs, a superior score. While Horner
has revisited the same ideas many times through the years, there are
certain scores that triumph with those motifs in ways that the other
scores cannot touch. For the four-note danger motif, that score was
Willow. For the ethereal ambience of light percussion, it was
The Spitfire Grill. And for the dancing key-shifting motif, it is
A Beautiful Mind. This score elevated not only that specific
idea, but a handful of others as well, shaping them into the best format
that the composer's collectors have heard. For that achievement alone,
A Beautiful Mind is not only one of Horner's more compelling
scores, but a top five competitor in the extremely competitive year of
2001. Will the score bother Horner's critics who can't tolerate the
recycling of ideas? Absolutely, because there really is no clear, fresh
new idea to be heard in the work. But you can't expect to hear scores
that travel wildly in a tangent, like
The Mask of Zorro or its
sequel, every time. You won't even hear the individuality of
Titanic on most occasions (a good thing for many listeners). If
you accept the fact that Horner resides in a comfort zone and will
occasionally blast out something as horrifically derivative as
Enemy
at the Gates, then
A Beautiful Mind is, by comparison, about
as good as it gets. On album, there is enough flash in the several
performances of the key-shifting motif to create that appeal. Buyers
should be aware, however, that due to the overriding seriousness of the
film's exploration of Nash's paranoid hallucinations, these cues of
mathematical dancing with Church's voice are limited to only about ten
minutes in length. The song performance by Church near the end of the
product is surprisingly mellow, not the kind of inspirational or
overwhelming effort that you felt was the intention behind the
Horner/Celine Dion collaborations. It relies on operatic tones rather
than those of pop, reaching towards a different crowd. The score holds a
consistent volume for a total of over seventy minutes, and it doesn't
feature a loud mood-breaking set of cues in any sequence. It's a clever
and momentous score in its highlights and a solid background listening
experience in its moodier explorations.
**** @Amazon.com: CD or
Download
| Bias Check: |
For James Horner reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.15
(in 108 reviews)
and the average viewer rating is 3.23
(in 203,515 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.
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The insert contains no extra information about the film or score, but the CD is
an auto-loading enhanced product with textual and video interviews with Horner (who
appeared to have gained both some weight and a scruffy beard) and Ron Howard, along with
pictures from the film and a trailer.
