Filmtracks Traffic Rank: #1,859
Written 2/8/12
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Buy it... if you need reinforcement that China is a place of
nightmares for Westerners, in which case Thomas Newman's brutally
challenging use of that country's stereotypical instrumental tones will
further dissuade you from ever wanting to travel there.
Avoid it... if you have little tolerance for film music that
inelegantly forces a socio-political dichotomy upon you, Newman's
symphonic relief for the protagonists too disparately heroic despite
yielding eight minutes of beautiful material for the album.
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| Newman |
Red Corner: (Thomas Newman) Having your film banned
in China is not necessarily a bad thing, though when the 1997 movie
Red Corner received that honor, it was for understandable
reasons. The film seems to exist only for three reasons; first, to serve
as a vehicle for Richard Gere in the role of a virtuous and hot American
businessman who makes Chinese men look ineffective and/or unattractive.
Secondly, the movie feeds the stereotype of Asian women as being starved
for a sexual encounter with men like Gere. Finally, and most
importantly, Red Corner was a clear political shot aimed at China
at the time, further demonizing the communist nation and its relatively
primitive and brutal justice system. While masquerading as a courtroom
drama, the film was inevitably received as further condemnation of the
corruption in Chinese institutional systems, leaving little in the way
of narrative depth or unexpected pathos to really distinguish its story.
Gere plays an American businessman on the verge of completing a
satellite communications deal with the communist government when he is
arrested for allegedly killing the daughter of a prominent Chinese
general. He spends the remainder of the film working with a beautiful,
young female attorney who is skeptical of his claims of innocence but
eventually helps the businessman uncover the plot against him. By the
time Gere starts running around on the streets with a weapon, you know
you're in pointlessly unlikely territory. The absence of truly
compelling or unexpected socio-political concepts in Red Corner,
despite the filmmakers' efforts to recreate immense Chinese locales in
Los Angeles and utilize real footage of executions from that nation,
caused the film to fade quickly from theatres after a poor critical
response. The project represented the fourth and final collaboration
between director Jon Avent and composer Thomas Newman in the 1990's,
each score exploring disparate styles with varying levels of success.
The tepid and underwhelming romantic environment of Up Close &
Personal the previous year represented some of the least interesting
music of Newman's career despite his attempts to infuse some
international flavor into the otherwise sterile score. For Red
Corner, the composer would go overboard with that unique
instrumentation, bridging his lyrical sensibilities of the early 1990's
with the more experimental tones of his 2000's works. The film clearly
used its music as another means of emphasizing the frighteningly foreign
environment of the locale, to which end Newman's approach is a
success.
If ever a film required its original music to scare the
hell out of someone with a heavy layer of oppressive, Chinese-flavored
tones,
Red Corner would be it, and Newman took the opportunity to
push every element of that nation's musical stereotypes to scary levels.
The conflict in the score is obvious, the orchestral ensemble and its
inherent lyricism and fleeting warmth doing sonic battle with the erhu,
zheng, saz, and a variety of other instruments that may not be all too
uncommon to Newman's other works. He even slips in mournful female
vocals at several poignant moments and brackets some cues on the album
release with the sounds of Beijing traffic and pedestrians. Three
separate musicians are credited for creating "drones" in
Red
Corner, and the score certainly contains a healthy amount of
excessively brooding ambient tones in the bass region, perpetually
trying to give the listener that "sinking feeling." The film's action
sequences simply feature louder versions of this material. Some of the
Chinese instrumental applications are quite compelling, but, outside of
the "Main Title," this usage is typically meant to alienate rather than
suggest the beauty that these instruments can convey in brighter
circumstances. There exist only two significant motifs in
Red
Corner, the dark side of the work dominated by a progression that
spends most of its time droning on key; early in the score, it's a
three-note motif ("Main Title" and "Capitalism"), but it later dissolves
into a brutal, more simplistic minor third alternation that culminates
in the tension of "Verdict." The techniques of this idea smother most of
the rest of the score, creating several unpleasant ambient cues starting
immediately with "Communism." While this material doesn't really develop
in the score, it remains interesting because of the instrumental colors.
The other theme of
Red Corner is its primary idea, existing for
the female lawyer and previewed in the first half of "Main Title." It
flourishes almost artificially in "Shen Yuelin" and "Remarkable Things,"
seeming to suggest that Western symphonic tones represent an American
sense of justice aided by this character. The extremely tonal and
victorious crescendos of these two cues, including remarkably crisp
brass counterpoint, are so clean and heroic that they force-feed the
political point of the cultural dichotomy with inelegant bravado. The
latter cue, the finale, does conclude with an intentionally unresolved
wail of female voice, which is a nice touch. On album, these two tracks
are the main attraction, a welcome relief from the persistently troubled
environment of the remainder. Three source tracks round out the
challenging but usually engaging listening experience. Like the film,
this music certainly gives you no desire to ever visit China.
*** @Amazon.com: CD or
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Bias Check:
For Thomas Newman reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.14
(in 37 reviews) and the average viewer rating is 3.18
(in 60,837 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.
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