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| Goldenthal |
Cobb: (Elliot Goldenthal) The worst kind of movie
you could have released late in 1994 was one about the American sport of
baseball. A labor disagreement between the players' union and the owners
of the clubs caused Major League Baseball to become the first
professional sport in the country to lose an entire postseason due to a
strike. Amidst intense fan discontent, Warner Brothers released a
biographical movie about baseball legend Ty Cobb, one based upon the
biographical work that sportswriter Al Stump did with Cobb in the last
years of his life. Despite all the magnificent achievements that Cobb
managed on the baseball field, he was an impossible personality to deal
with, a vindictive and abusive man who had few friends by the time of
his death. The Ron Shelton movie that detailed the relationship between
Stump and Cobb (and told of the latter's career in retrospect) was
challenged itself by a bittersweet personality, the depictions of Cobb
and his legendary outbursts delivered without remorse by Tommy Lee
Jones. Its release at the end of 1994 all but doomed its prospects, and
generally poor reviews of the unsavory topic combined with the disdain
of most towards baseball at the time to cause
Cobb to become one
of the year's most embarrassing fiscal disasters at the box office.
Other than Jones' lead performance, one of the few enduring qualities of
Cobb worth mentioning is Elliot Goldenthal's score. The composer
was enjoying the most fruitful period of his career in terms of
mainstream film scoring, transitioning into a series of blockbuster
science-fiction and fantasy assignments noted for their wildly inventive
and unconventional music. By 1994, he was a known commodity, supplying
films with strikingly intelligent music that often applied instrumental
techniques of unique character where unnecessary. He was developing a
reputation for writing not only challenging orchestral scores, but
extremely schizophrenic ones as well. While his involvement with
projects like
Batman Forever and
Titus yielded the
craziest and least consistent stylistic scores during this period,
Cobb is a slightly more cohesive sibling to these works.
Goldenthal has never been afraid to force disparate musical genres into
a single score (and even individual cues), and this 1994 effort is
clearly an instance where the composer intentionally pitted a variety of
sounds against each other to cause a feeling of torment and discord.
It's difficult to dismiss
Cobb because of the consequent
schizophrenia that it so adeptly flaunts, but the score is nevertheless
a fascinatingly maddening experience on album.
Expect to read many accounts that applaud Goldenthal's
approach to
Cobb, most of which once again glowing about the
composer's wildly inventive clashes of musical identities. Indeed, there
has to be intellectual appreciation of what the composer accomplishes
here; rarely do you hear film music with so many intentional collisions
of disparate tones, genres, rhythms, and pitches. At the same time,
Cobb is a score without any sensible cohesion outside of its
direct adherence to the context of the movie. On one hand, you hear
Goldenthal addressing the pastoral aspect of the sport and its legend,
using a wholesome trumpet theme over sentimental strings for what little
sincerely caring angle exists in the story. Heard in "Variations on an
Old Baptist Hymn" and "Stump Meets Cobb," the idea dissolves in much of
the score until a melancholy reprise in "Cobb Dies." Even within these
seemingly wholesome passages, Goldenthal toys with the progressions of
the theme to twist it into the minor key at periodic intervals. The same
technique permeates the lengthy Americana string performances in the
"Cooperstown Aria" cues and "The Homecoming," all of which brooding more
often than not. Other motifs exist in the score, but not to a
structurally important end. Rather, the score's chaotic blend of vintage
jazz, hymns from America's Deep South, and roaring action sequences keep
the listener guessing. The opening hymn utilizes Goldenthal's own
gritty, soulful vocals in eerie layers, and "Stump Meets Cobb" features
unnaturally skittish string figures to perhaps represent the scheming
Stump. While "Nevada Nightlight" and "Meant Monk" present straight
forward vintage night club jazz, "Newsreel Mirror" and "Georgia Peach
Rag" intentionally mangle that genre with extremely abrasive brass and
woodwind textures supplemented by groaning dissonance and shattering
percussion that wouldn't be out of place in
Alien 3. The two
"Reno Ho" cues offer tremendous symphonic action akin to Goldenthal's
Final Fantasy work (stripped back in "Sour Mash Scherzo"). Softer
cues of battling tones on woodwinds and strings in "Winter Walk" and
"Hart and Hunter" are unsettling at best. Throaty horror overtakes the
pastoral side in "The Baptism," a cue that ends with a rowdy crescendo
of pure, swirling Goldenthal character. Perhaps not unexpectedly, the
cue "The Beast Within," inspired by
Alien 3, is credited and
included on this soundtrack, followed by the vintage
baseball-appropriate song "The Ball Game." All together, every moment of
Cobb contains Goldenthal's usual brilliance of construct and
instrumentation, but unless you specifically seek the composer's score
to appreciate them intellectually, don't expect this work to hit a home
run. Like many of the composer's most impressive achievements,
Cobb could drive a person crazy.
@Amazon.com: CD or
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- Music as Written for the Film: ****
- Music as Heard on Album: ***
- Overall: ****
| Bias Check: |
For Elliot Goldenthal reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.13
(in 16 reviews)
and the average viewer rating is 3.2
(in 17,814 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.
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The insert includes a short note from the composer about the score.
