Buy it... with caution even if you are a Thomas Newman collector, for the romantic highlights of this score are tepid and infrequent.

Avoid it... if warmth in melody and performance is your expectation, the lack that key element in the score compensated for by the famous Celine Dion song heard in the film but not included on the soundtrack album.

Newman

Up Close & Personal: (Thomas Newman) Hollywood screws up good scripts all the time, often taking a compelling real story and sweetening it with romantic fluff to help sell tickets to female audiences eager to see major stars flash their chemistry on screen. Such was the case with the Robert Redford and Michelle Pfeiffer love-fest Up Close & Personal, but the difference between this 1996 film and other equivalent butcherings of a non-fiction concept is that critics blasted its studio mercilessly for its streamlined disrespect for the person who inspired its plot. That woman was Jessica Savitch, a controversial television anchorwoman of the 1970's and early 1980's whose rise to fame was just as sensationalized as the circumstances of her accidental death in 1983. After adapting the Alanna Nash biography of Savitch in the late 1980's, the screenwriters for Up Close & Personal suffered a total of eight years of studio meddling with the script that caused the writers so much trauma that they wrote their own book about the awful experience. By the time Disney's Touchstone Pictures was finished with Up Close & Personal, the movie existed only to serve as a mindless romance story for Redford and Pfeiffer, which didn't make much sense given that the altered story contained a depressing ending involving the death of a lead character that was completely unrelated to the real life events that inspired the film. None of these problems stopped female viewers from turning the project into one of mild success for Disney, and its legacy is largely associated most frequently with the popular love ballad "Because You Loved Me" written for the film's romantic bonding sequences. The innocuous Diane Warren song, performed smoothly by Celine Dion, was popular enough to earn the only major awards nominations (Academy, Grammy, and Golden Globe) enjoyed by this picture. Relegated to a secondary role was Thomas Newman's score for Up Close & Personal, his third of four collaborations with director Jon Avent in the 1990's. Newman was finally beginning to fill the shoes of his father in the industry early in that decade, a frequent Oscar nominee and an artist whose distinct instrumental and rhythmic style earned him an immediate fanbase within the film music community. Unfortunately, the palatability of Newman's music for those Avent movies declined as the 1990's progressed, never again achieving the affable personality of Fried Green Tomatoes.

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Newman's contribution to Up Close & Personal plays like patchwork compilation of the composer's developing skills in various genres, never completely leaving his comfort zone but traversing an extremely wide range of styles without excelling at any of them for very long. The overall spirit of his approach is surprisingly sparse and cold, his romantic material barely registering with any convincing sense of warmth. The many scenes of conversation are handled by Newman with very restrained atmospheres of mostly tonal but insignificant structures. Don't expect to hear obvious themes in Up Close & Personal, though when he does allow them to flourish, the score is at its best. Strings and piano carry these duties in these highlights, "Up Close" introducing the main theme on string layers and occasional oboe for the opening scenes. The demeanor of this identity is reminiscent of James Horner's quieter drama and Rachel Portman's chord progressions of the era. Developed further in "Upwind," this theme receives its most emotional climax in "She Knows Now," concluding the album release with two lovely minutes of sorrowful harmony that will justify the entire product for some Newman collectors. The purely background cues in Up Close & Personal do flirt with this theme on occasion, but they tend to reside so faintly in the soundscape that you do not notice them. The other elements at play in the score are the detractions, the Miami location treated to mambo tones that Newman tepidly explores in "Miss Sierra Logger" (the Latin flair is much better represented by the source usage of Tito Puente's "Hong Kong Mambo"). Because the two leads find themselves in tense situations as part of their reporting duties, Newman's score veers off into suspense territory with poor results. The ethnic woodwind accents to the percussive rumblings of "Uprise" are unconvincing, and similarly vague ethnicity dilutes the effectiveness of "Los Locos." The most forceful cue is "Cellblock C," which takes the previous suspense motif's percussive base and layers odd sound effects and tapped cymbals on top for an unnerving couple of minutes. After a stinger in "Bonefish," this material is reprised in echoes. One of the main issues that a listener will have with Up Close & Personal is its poor album presentation; without the cues in chronological order, what little narrative flow Newman was able to create is totally lost. Also an obvious problem with the product is the absence of the Dion song, which addresses the romance of the story infinitely better than the score does. This effort ultimately qualifies as one of Newman's weakest of the 1990's, despite what little redemption comes in the album's final track. **   Amazon.com Price Hunt: CD or Download

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For Thomas Newman reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.14 (in 28 reviews) and the average viewer rating is 3.13 (in 53,317 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.