Buy it... if you have enjoyed every variant of Dario Marianelli's moody and weighty rhythmic writing for mainstream films over the previous few years.

Avoid it... if you expect the score to truly explore the duality of character and the concept of justice in its underdeveloped primary theme.

Marianelli

The Brave One: (Dario Marianelli) Movies about vigilantes seeking justice in the absence of adequate law enforcement date back to the glory days of Charles Bronson in the 1970's, and while Hollywood seems desperate to tap this seemingly endless well of inspiration, Neil Jordan's The Brave One examines the concept from a slightly different perspective. A seemingly ageless Jodie Foster has received rave reviews for her performance as a city radio personality whose fiance is killed in random street violence, leading her on a mission of revenge more complicated than you've seen on screen before. Armed and willing to bait criminals to their death by playing helpless, her character provides the film with a deeply introspective character study involving the boundaries between right and wrong. It's an identity crisis flick with a splash of violence, and Jordan counters Foster's coy moves with an intelligent supporting cast investigating her wake. Jordan's choice of composer has shifted wildly through the years, often retaining a capable composer who exists just outside the mainstream of film scoring. That choice for The Brave One would be European Dario Marianelli, who made a dashing mark in the vigilante genre with V for Vendetta the previous year. Marianelli's career has taken several successful turns in the past three years, with the initial box office success of The Brave One further aiding his marketability for future projects. His scores for American films have best been described as "colorful," for his distinct style in rhythm and instrumentation give his work an enticingly refreshing and often dark edge. For The Brave One, Marianelli utilizes many familiar elements from his previous mainstream scores, combining a moderately sized orchestral ensemble with varied percussion and an array of synthetic effects.

The tone of the score is, not surprisingly, moody and obscured in the shadows, brooding in the lower ranges of the ensemble for nearly its entire length. Even before the tragedy at the outset of the film and in the waning minutes of its resolution, there are no moments of sunshine in this gloomy venture. Marianelli claims that his aim with the score for The Brave One was not to accentuate the brief (though graphic) scenes of actual vigilante justice. Instead, he attempted to reinforce the examination of "right and wrong" in the duality of his score. While the constructs that he uses to convey this internal struggle are adequate, and occasionally truly interesting, his score fails to really pry open that box of horrors. Though intelligent, his score doesn't raise the kind of contemplative ingenuity (in a musical sense) that his listeners know he is capable of producing. His theme for Erica (Foster) barely registers in its harmonic continuity. The theme is there, in other words, but not so you'd really notice. Performed primarily by piano with an interlude for acoustic guitar, the theme appears to have aimed at capturing Erica's more contented lifestyle pre-tragedy when, in fact, Marianelli doesn't really even to attempt masking the turmoil to come. Further into the score, while you do hear slight references on cello and other solo instruments to the opening theme in the action sequences, you'll discover that the majority of running time for Marianelli is assigned to inflective moments along her journey to self-rediscovery. In moments like "Wedding Cards," among many, Marianelli returns to the soft piano and string shades, once again aided by guitar, that haunted the opening cue. Unfortunately, these cues are so restrained in their statements that their emotional impact is marginal at best.

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When you put several of these softer cues together, you begin yearning for the action pieces in The Brave One, which, conversely, better represent the typical designs of Marianelli's suspense and action music of the past few years. The horror sequences near the beginning of the score are standard dissonant passages for strings and electronics, though the actual revenge cues later in the score stir up hints of the composer's far more interesting rhythmic tendencies. A string ostinato not unlike John Powell's chase motif for The Bourne Identity (and its superior follow-ups) is fully explored in "On the Prowl," and Marianelli allows the motif to build to a frenzy by the time "Car Jam" and "Retribution" roll along. This technique of slowly increasing the velocity of a rhythmic motif in a score as a film builds to a climax is a definite Marianelli specialty. By these final two tracks, the only aspects of these rhythms that distinguish them from the powerful variants by Powell (and other Hans Zimmer graduates, as well as Graeme Revell) is Marianelli's inescapably weighty sense of gloom. During these rhythms, in addition to the gruesome cues of violence near the outset, Marianelli once again utilizes a wide variety of screeching metallic sound effects and light percussion in the treble region. While the specialty instrumentation in The Brave One may not be as creative as in many of his other scores, it saves the effort from dwelling the depths of the mundane. Still, Marianelli fans risk disappointment with this score, if only because the development of the character split is not well enough explored and the instrumentation doesn't spark enough interest to alone raise The Brave One to the level of his previous mainstream efforts. It is a sufficient score with a few highlights possibly worth inclusion on a Marianelli compilation, but it fails to grasp the realm of true intrigue that constantly remains just out of its reach. ***   Amazon.com Price Hunt: CD or Download

Bias Check:

For Dario Marianelli reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.67 (in 9 reviews) and the average viewer rating is 3.37 (in 4,528 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.