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Cinderella Man: (Thomas Newman) In what promises to
provide the first sure-fire Oscar buzz of 2005,
Cinderella Man
reunites the star and major crew of
A Beautiful Mind for a historical
sports film with attention to detail as its knockout ally. Based on the
real-life events of the life of boxer James J. Braddock, the Ron Howard film
uses the story to not only show a comeback at its most heartening, but also
portrays the stark struggles of working-class Americans during the era of
the Great Depression. The quality of the film resides in Howard's ability to
balance his attention on every single character and setting in the film,
spreading the wealth of his cinematic eye for detail to every dark corner of
its production. The film's crew changed over several times, with such
transitions, along with an injury to star Russell Crowe, delaying the film
from its expected December, 2004 release to a week opposite the hype of
Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith in early summer, 2005. With Howard
coming on board after the film was already rolling around the studio for
some time, it is perhaps no surprise that his usual collaborator for music,
James Horner, is absent from
Cinderella Man. The irony in this
situation is that Horner is adept (or obsessed, some might say) at creating
music with a distinct Irish flair, a genre of music that would creep into
the eventual score for
Cinderella Man provided by Thomas Newman. No
stranger to ethnic and experimental instrumentation, Newman incorporates an
Irish influence into his music with less of the outward and over-saturated
expression that often irritates listeners of Horner's music.
Newman has been experiencing a second renaissance in his
career since 2003, with
Finding Nemo,
Angels in America, and
Lemony Snicket all leading the highly talented composer on a path
away from his plunking, instrumentally bizarre experimentation of the late
1990's and early 2000's. As you would expect,
Cinderella Man demands
a weightier dramatic presence much closer to the sound of
Angels in
America than that of
American Beauty. Fans of the era in Newman's
career in which he announced his presence to the world with scores like
The Shawshank Redemption and
Little Women will be impressed
and heartened by
Cinderella Man. While the bravado and large-scale
crescendos of
Angels in America and his other recent successes are
not present in the vast majority of
Cinderella Man, the score is
built on a solid orchestral foundation worthy of the era. That said, most of
Newman's effort meanders in the distance, allowing the atmosphere inherent
in the picture to be the primary storyteller. In early portions of the
score, Newman offers stark piano performances of a harmonic theme that is
dampened by a slight atonality that likely is used to convey a sense of hope
while also remaining rooted in the serious financial troubles of the film's
primary characters. The pace of these sequences in the score is very slow
--almost painstakingly so-- and a certain amount of patience is required.
The cue "Cold Meat Party" is forty seconds of only a droning sound effect,
maintaining the mood for the surrounding cues. These appropriately
understated cues in the score extend from start to finish, with only a
handful of notable exceptions.
The first volume cue, "Corn Griffin," provides a driving
drum rhythm over a single, lengthy brass and string note, culminating in a
cymbal-tapping crescendo. One of two major Irish-influenced pieces in the
score is "The Hope of the Irish," for which fiddles and seven eight other
solo musicians perform on the standard array of Newman's instrumental
diversity. These ideas would be expanded upon in "Turtle," at the end of the
album, and outside of these two cues, there is little Irish expression in
Cinderella Man. The plucking rhythms that have defined much of
Newman's career make a token appearance with the strings in "Pugilism," set
over a deep drum array. It takes until the 21st track on album, "Big Right,"
before the heroism of the story is finally mirrored by Newman, with that cue
offering the first satisfying, large-scale presentation of brass and
full-ensemble thematic performances. In the two subsequent cues, which
alternate between the elegance of Newman's soft sense of resolution and the
established, restrained string themes, feature much in common with sections
of
Angels in America, especially in the flutterings of the woodwinds.
Overall, on album,
Cinderella Man features less than 30 minutes of
score, with the cues (sometimes beginning with the sound effects of crowd
noise) often exiting as quickly as they enter. The period songs are
appropriate, but break the flow of Newman's score. The final handful of
triumphant cues indicate yet another strong score from Newman, but it takes
a while to get there, and with the shortness of the cues and the lack much
relation between score and songs, the album loses a star in rating.
Nevertheless, Newman's continued technique of stating heroism in various
layers of restraint is impressive.
****
| Bias Check: | For Thomas Newman reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating
is 3.2 (in 20 reviews)
and the average viewer rating is 3.3
(in 50,023 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.
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The insert includes no extra information about the score or film.
