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Written 1/28/25
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Buy it... only if you seek to complete your collection of drab,
unexpressive, and emotionless Hans Zimmer dramas of minimal scope.
Avoid it... if you're badly constipated, because nothing in this
music will help inspire that stubborn turd to get moving.
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| Zimmer |
The Son: (Hans Zimmer) It's not unusual to
encounter films of highly disturbing familial challenges that rely on
superb acting performances to elevate their appeal. Director Florian
Zeller's pair of The Father in 2020 and The Son in 2022
are those types of movies; both are remarkably depressing in their own
ways, but The Father was an award-winning success that earned
high praise for star Anthony Hopkins while The Son was a
monumental failure that left audiences bewildered and upset without any
empathetic catharsis. While Hopkins reprises a similar role in the
second movie as a not-so-nice grandpa, it's Hugh Jackman that is the
centerpiece of the production. He plays a father with sons from two
different wives, one a 17-year-old and another a very young product of
his second marriage. The older boy blames his father for his depression
and suicidal thoughts, unable to reconcile his father's affair with the
woman who became his second wife. Meanwhile, the father attempts to
apply his lessons learned from his first failed family to avoid making
the same mistakes again. Not surprisingly, the situation turns from bad
to worse, and the father and mother of the 17-year-old are not able to
prevent the worst outcome. The topic and story allowed Jackman to dabble
in awards consideration, but the story of The Son is so
appallingly upsetting that few audiences or critics ultimately cared.
It's a movie that makes you feel terrible about humanity, with no
redeeming lesson to convey and an unrecouped budget to show for it.
The Father had been scored by Ludovico Einaudi, but for The
Son Zeller landed Hans Zimmer for the assignment. The composer had
been dabbling in several lesser-known dramas during the early 2020's,
often with a co-composer or ghostwriter in tow. In this case, that
secondary composer is David Fleming, though his contribution does not
rise to co-compositional credit. The work is comprised of solely a
string ensemble and synthesizers, with Zimmer's usual solo collaborators
on strings providing minimal sonic coloration beyond the string ensemble
and occasional ambient synthetic effects. The result is a score that is
a less dramatic version of The Survivor and akin to Rebuilding
Paradise, providing very basic and conservative musical foundations
that don't have much impact on the film.
Among Zimmer's light, morbid drama scores,
The
Son may very well be his most bleak, accomplishing no emotional
connection and totally failing to solve the empathy issues suffered by
the film. This kind of music is meant to be dialed down by a sound mixer
in the final product to yield absolutely no character and minimal
warmth. Most of Zimmer's cues are formulated by series of pulsating
string notes with almost no secondary lines. Sometimes the players
quiver, but it's mostly a score of long sustains and perpetual haze,
performance inflection held to nearly non-existent levels. The score is
mostly tonal in a foggy manner, though dissonant textures on strings
define "Bridge," "Nicholas," and "Divide." The melodic structures in
The Son do exist, but they are completely unmemorable because of
their excruciatingly slow tempos. You really need to listen to the score
at double speed to discern the very slight melodic structures at work,
and even then, the listening experience still seems frightfully slow.
The main theme in the "Waves" cues is a seven-note series that meanders
with no anchoring point, its three-note primary phrase answered by a
four-note response. The sounds of ocean waves on a beach in the "Waves"
cues is a decent technique but not really all that creative. This theme
takes a more pensive tact in "Mirror" and is very slight but marginally
more hopeful in the conclusive "Mirage." A secondary theme is a
distinct, longer-lined identity in "Love is Not Enough" that hints at
deeper drama and makes better use of the soloists. The structure of this
idea repeats endlessly without much modulation, matching the main theme
in its wholly cold demeanor. It's possible that "Nicholas" is a
deconstructed version of this second theme, but Zimmer fails to tie in
earlier representations of the troubled boy into this idea to denote his
downfall. The entirety of
The Son is emotionally inept and devoid
of any meaningful narrative. It has the constructs and sound of a
sideshow diversion for the composer, not one striving to develop any
kind of soul for the shattered families in the story. It's not
unlistenable music by any means; in fact, the score can pass by without
any significant negative moment to break its mood. But that experience
is so pointless from start to finish that few listeners will find much
appeal to the work on album. That product is only 20 minutes long, which
is somewhat merciful given the absolute boredom it will invoke. Zimmer
can be infinitely better than this, and the film definitely could have
used more emotionally engaging music.
** @Amazon.com: CD or
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Bias Check:
For Hans Zimmer reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 2.85
(in 128 reviews) and the average viewer rating is 2.96
(in 299,193 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.
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