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| Williams |
The Post: (John Williams) At a time when
dictatorial American president Donald Trump was dangerously eroding the
public confidence in the free press, director Steven Spielberg rushed to
produce a film about the famed Pentagon Papers that illuminated the
government's secretly held, pessimistic assessment of the Vietnam War. A
military contractor copied and leaked classified reports detailing how
badly the war had actually been going for decades, and The New York
Times and Washington Post newspapers fought and eventually won in
court over their publishing of these accounts in 1971. The fallout from
revelations segued directly into the reporting of the Watergate scandal
that ended the Richard Nixon presidency. The production schedule of
The Post was remarkably short in its development of the material,
Spielberg irking supporters of The New York Times by concentrating on
the concurrent deliberations by the editors and owner of the Washington
Post paper instead. Actors Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks are in top form,
and Spielberg's film won significant praise from an industry eager to
embrace a fortuitously timed story about the importance of journalism.
(Hanks, not surprisingly, refused the notion of personally screening the
film at the White House for Trump.) Receiving muted but predictable
praise was John Williams' score for
The Post, earning the maestro
awards consideration despite the music's short duration and restrained
stature. Having collaborated with Spielberg for upwards of thirty films,
Williams supplied music to this film rather than the director's
concurrently produced
Ready Player One, for which Spielberg
turned instead to Alan Silvestri. Williams was already contending with a
busy 2017, his music for
Star Wars: The Last Jedi and the
animated short
Dear Basketball yielding an extremely satisfying
year of writing for the 85-year-old composer. By comparison to those
two, emotionally overflowing scores,
The Post is an exercise in
Williams minimalism wholly appropriate for the context of the historical
drama. The composer admitted that he had never experienced a newsroom
environment, but he was certainly well prepared to handle political
strife and conversational interplay from yesteryear, not to mention his
usual knack for conveying subtle Americana tones of grave nobility. As
such, he afforded the film a combination of propulsive, rhythmic tones
for the news environment, somber ambience for the political stakes,
elegant barroom piano for the characters, and a flourish of brass and
string reverence at the end for the victory of the press.
Everything heard in the music for
The Post will
be familiar to a Williams collector, strains of
JFK and
Nixon joining echoes of the composer's 1970's orchestral style
and late 1980's piano work to form an underwhelming but effective and
recognizable narrative. The orchestra and piano combination plays as
expected, the only kink in the equation taking the form of electronic
bass pulses in "The Papers" and tingling electric guitar late in
"Deciding to Publish." The delicate piano portions are divided between
Williams' exploration of the score's character theme ("Mother and
Daughter" and "End Credits") and source pieces ("The Oak Room, 1971" and
"Two Martini Lunch"), with accessible but shy expressions of elegance.
Sequences of ominous, light dissonance exist in "Nixon's Order" and
"Deciding to Publish." The only truly optimistic relief in the score
comes, understandably, in "The Court's Decision and End Credits,"
Williams' typical French horn majesty denoting the significance of the
occasion and summarizing the score's motific constructs. Aside from the
piano-led character theme, which bleeds into the string and brass
expressions in his final cue, Williams highlights
The Post with
his rhythmic motif for the newsroom suspense. Fragmented in "The
Papers," this theme flourishes in "Setting the Type" and "The Presses
Roll," a descending, seven-note figure leading several related fragments
over pulsating low strings. Listeners will recognize these figures as
relating to the frantic rhythmic escape motif for the resistance
fighters in
Star Wars: The Last Jedi, especially in the more
sparsely grim "Setting the Type." Late in both cues, Williams brings the
motif to a crescendo that includes woodwinds and high brass in the
descending layers, offering suspense of engaging appeal. While most
listeners will stray towards "The Court's Decision and End Credits" as
the defining cue of
The Post (it does have a nicely forceful
evolution of the suspense motif turned backwards into an ascending
figure from 4:30 to 6:00), the pair of rhythmic suspense cues earlier in
the score remains the highlight. The 1970's sensibility in the wholesome
writing early in "The Presses Roll" is not only a nostalgic plus for
Williams collectors, but an acknowledgement by the composer that his own
sound of that era was uniquely positioned for success in this situation.
With all of that said, however,
The Post is more a functional
piece of the puzzle than a work of art, Williams succeeding without
making much of a statement on his own. It is certainly mundane compared
to his other output of 2017, but that was the point of his approach. The
album is brief and sadly out of film order, a reassuring but largely
unremarkable and redundant listening experience.
@Amazon.com: CD or
Download
- Music as Written for the Film: ****
- Music as Heard on Album: ***
- Overall: ***
| Bias Check: |
For John Williams reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.68
(in 91 reviews)
and the average viewer rating is 3.54
(in 363,716 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.
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The insert includes a list of performers and the customary note about the
score and film from director Steven Spielberg.
