Secretariat In Search of a Score

For me, “Secretariat” (2010) is a textbook example of what’s wrong with movies today – lack of emotion.

The story of the famous Triple Crown winner, and the obstacles overcome to make him a champion, should have been lump-in-the-throat terrific, inspirational and capable of sending us out of the theater on a wave of happiness.

Instead it just sits there, never reaching the heights it should. The acting is wonderful (Diane Lane is a standout, but then she always is), but there’s something missing. What is it?

What “Secretariat” needed was something considered taboo today: a good old fashioned, rousing, gloriously in your face, celebratory musical score.

It’s been said a good score can’t save a bad movie. True enough. But a good score can enrich a movie in so many ways and a good score can make a good film great. And a bad or mediocre score can seriously harm a movie, more than the audience may realize.

If there’s any genre that requires a surging and rousing score, it’s the triumphant sports movie genre. Confident directors know that and, to use an obvious sports metaphor, allow their composers to take the ball and run with it. Director David Anspaugh knew what we he was doing when he hired Jerry Goldsmith to score “Hoosiers” (1986) and “Rudy” (1993). You want those big musical moments in sports movies. These movies are still celebrated. I know guys who worship at the altar of “Hoosiers” and they wouldn’t have that emotional connection to that movie without Goldsmith’s efforts.

The smartest thing director Barry Levinson ever did was hire Randy Newman, who composed a landmark score for “The Natural” (1984). Newman’s musical treatment of each home run and baseball victory could raise goose bumps on a corpse, and is it little wonder Major League Baseball licensed portions of it to score highlight reels?

Director John Huston gave Bill Conti free rein to score every soccer kick, lunge, block and save in “Victory” (1981) for maximum effectiveness. Conti obliged and scored these sequences like he was composing a sports symphony. It’s thrilling beyond words.

I still remember the audience applause when all the above movies were over. The music was a major catalyst in providing that emotional release.

Alas, when Secretariat lunges forward to win the Triple Crown (hardly giving anything away here folks), there’s no surging, triumphant music to quicken the pulse and jump the heart beat. Instead we get some generic, non-rousing gospel music. It’s almost as if the director Randall Wallace, was afraid of overwhelming the audience, and told his composer, Nick Glennie-Smith, to tone down the music as much as possible. While I was able to admire the scene, I was never swept up in the emotion of it. The whole movie is like that.

Heaven help Mr. Wallace if he’d be called manipulative. We can’t have that, could we? It would never do. When did having an honest emotional response become something to be ashamed of?

I remember reading an anecdote from composer Randy Newman about his work on the period football drama “Leatherheads” (2008). He said director George Clooney didn’t like a particular cue he had written, because Clooney felt the music was overplaying the emotion in the scene, which meant he had failed as a director because he was not able to get the point across sans music.

I’ve never felt it was the music that was telling me what to think. Instead music is there to deepen the ideas and emotions that are already there. The music is providing that last link, just like lighting or photography can do in a scene, to make it a total all-encompassing experience.

Watching a lot of contemporary movies, I get the feeling that many directors feel the way Clooney does. While music is one of the most effective tools a director has at his (or her) disposal, many directors are afraid to use it, or are sparing with it.

So for me, a lot of contemporary movies just sit there, pleasant, but hardly memorable. Like “Secretariat.”

The folks at Pixar know the importance of a good score, God love ‘em, and that’s one of the main reasons why the Pixar movies are so consistently alive.

Composer Bernard Herrmann was quoted as saying, “I feel that music on the screen can seek out and intensify the inner thoughts of the characters. It can invest a scene with terror, grandeur, gaiety, or misery. It can propel narrative swiftly forward, or slow it down. It often lifts mere dialogue into the realm of poetry. Finally, it is the communicating link between the screen and the audience, reaching out and enveloping all into one single experience.” (From “Film Score, the View from the Podium” by Tony Thomas, AS. Barnes and Co., Inc., 1979).

Truer words were never spoken.

Thanks to a thoroughly mediocre score, “Secretariat” will never enter the starting gate of great sports movies. Such a champion deserved better.

The Boys From Brazil

“The Boys from Brazil” (1978) is a terrific thriller, feature a pair of powerhouse performances courtesy Gregory Peck and Laurence Olivier. Add the great James Mason to the mix, and it’s triple the enjoyment. I caught it on TCM a few weeks ago, and liked it so much I went out and bought the DVD. I had forgotten how good it was.

No need to go into the story, based on a novel by Ira Levin, but I think everyone knows that The Boys from Brazil refers to Hitler clones. Dr. Josef Mengele (Gregory Peck), a real character, is among the refugee Nazis in South America busy hatching a diabolical scheme for a Fourth Reich using the clones. Ezra Lieberman (Laurence Olivier), an elderly Nazi hunter, gets wind of the scheme and tries to put a stop to it.

I remember when the movie came out and critics and audiences were pretty evenly split on the lead performances. Some thought Peck was laughably miscast as Mengele, while others thought the casting of good guy, All-American Peck in such a role was chilling and effective.

I can remember Peck appearing on “The Tonight Show” one night and pulling out clips of reviews from his pants, quoting the raves his performance had received from some critics. Apparently the barbs he took did not sit well with him.

For myself, I think Peck is quite good in the role. Not great, but better than I would have thought. It’s as amoral a role he ever played. Mengele was one of the great monsters of the 20th century, and Peck wisely does not try to humanize him.

Some found Olivier’s performance as Lieberman to be embarrassing and one-note, accusing him of doing an Albert Basserman impression. Others found him brilliant, and the Academy awarded him a Best Actor nomination that year.

I think Olivier is absolutely dazzling in the role. By turns warm and sarcastic, cynical and caring, aloof and tender, this is multi-dimensional character. It’s one of my all-time favorite Olivier performances. He lost the Best Actor Oscar to Jon Voight that year for “Coming Home.” I would have given it to Olivier, or Gary Busey for the wonderful “The Buddy Holly Story.”

Critics who didn’t like the movie made jokes about Peck and Olivier during their final fight scene, but let’s face it, the characters are old men, and they’re not going to be throwing each other across the room like Sean Connery and Robert Shaw. I have no problems with the scene as it plays out.

There’s some eerie imagery on display here. Mengele is not above genetically experimenting on the locals in his jungle compound, and the sight of those brown skinned, blue-eyed natives is chilling without being over the top. One of my favorite scenes occurs when Mengele returns to his old laboratory and he flashes back to his cloning experiments. No dialogue here, but the chilling operation scenes and the scenes of the mothers in the maternity ward are greatly helped by Jerry Goldsmith’s ominous music.

I love the score to “The Boys from Brazil.” Love it, love it, love it. The main waltz is one of Goldsmith’s great themes. It’s like another character in the movie. About 15 years ago I saw Goldsmith conduct the Milwaukee Symphony in a concert of his music and they played the waltz as part of a suite. It was wonderful to hear this music live. What a thrill that was.

(For my birthday following my initial viewing of the movie, my dad surprised me with the LP recording of the soundtrack, because he knew how much I liked the music. There aren’t many fathers who would have encouraged their son’s strange listening habits.)

Goldsmith’s score was nominated for an Oscar that year. but lost. So did John Williams’ score to “Superman.” Who did they lose to, but Giorgio Moroder for “Midnight Express.” In full disclosure, I’ve never seen that film or heard the score, so maybe it is a masterpiece. But I sure thought “Superman” was going to take the Best Score Oscar that year.

I can vividly remember the first time I saw the film. It seems like it was only yesterday.

My dad and I went to see the film on a Friday night at the Dolton, the second-run theater in my home town where I spent a large portion of my youth. It was the second show of the evening, and we were standing in the lobby waiting for the first show to let out. The doors opened as the end credits were rolling and we could hear that glorious Goldsmith score. I liked it the minute I heard it, and I couldn’t wait for the movie to start so I could hear it again.

Coming out of the theater with her family was Mary, a pretty, freckle-faced cute-as-can-be girl I had gone to grammar school and junior high with. We were going to separate high schools at the time, but I still saw her when she would come into the grocery store where I was working. We said hello to each other and she said it was a real good movie, that I would like it.

I saw her at the store the next week and agreed that yes, it was a terrific movie, my dad and I liked it a lot. Of course I wanted to tell her how much I liked the music but I learned very early on that there are some things –i.e. film scores – that you don’t discuss with girls. Still, I always wondered what she thought of the score to “The Boys from Brazil.” She probably didn’t even notice it. Her loss.

Rating for “The Boys from Brazil”: Three and a half stars.

.

Rambo

I thoroughly enjoyed “Rambo” (2008). So sue me. Sometimes you want to put your brain on hold and enjoy a rousing action flick. In “Rambo” the villains are very, very bad and we want to see them get their comeuppance. “Rambo” goes one better by decimating the bad guys in as many a gruesome ways as possible.

This is the fourth Rambo movie to star Sylvester Stallone. Following his very triumphant return to the Rocky Balboa character in, not surprisingly, “Rocky Balboa” (2006), Stallone decided to return to his other iconic character, John Rambo, the killing machine born from the Vietnam War (and an uncaring U.S. populace upon his return home).

In “Rambo” Stallone is grotesquely oversized, like a character in a Tex Avery cartoon. He’s approached to bring some American medical workers, from a church in Colorado, into Burma to bring medicine to villagers suffering from genocide. He refuses to take them in until convinced to do so by the lone female, Sarah (Julie Benz, Darla from the “Angel” TV series). Of course they get captured and Rambo, after being asked by the pastor of the Colorado church (Ken Howard) goes after them.

Though the film is directed and co-written by Stallone, his age is addressed in an off-hand manner. He accompanies some mercenaries to bring the missionaries back. Twenty years ago Rambo would have handled the job by himself. Today, he can’t do it alone. Rambo is still the super solider, but he has the help of the mercenaries.

“Rambo” is incredibly violent, probably the most violent entry in the series. Some have questioned the taste of using the genocide in Burma as the background for an action movie, even including actual news clips of the Burmese situation at the beginning of the film. Genocide is occurring in that part of the world, on a scale I don’t think we have heard about yet. So there’s a primal satisfaction in seeing these animals get what they have been dishing out for years.

Despite the violence, “Rambo” is a beautiful looking film. Filmed on location in the lush, green hillsides of Thailand, Glen MacPherson’s cinematography captures the haunting beauty of terrain.

There’s a lot of fast cutting and hand held camera work in the action scenes, a la the Jason Bourne movies. I may be getting used to the technique, because it doesn’t bother me as much as it used to. The final 15 minutes is a veritable orgy of action, flying bullets and exploding limbs. But Stallone is a masterful director of action, and we always know where the protagonists are in relation to each other. There’s no confusion about who’s shooting at who, or from which direction the danger is coming from. So many contemporary action movies are more concerned with the cutting and the size of the explosions, they lose focus of the action’s geography. Not here.

Brian Tyler contributes an effective score, and I was heartened to see Jerry Goldsmith’s “First Blood” theme used in part of the opening and closing credits. It was like hearing a new Goldsmith score at the movies. It was a nice touch.

Looking forward to the fifth Rambo movie.

Rating for “Rambo”: Three stars.