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Cold Mountain: (Gabriel Yared) Considered a front-runner for a
slew of awards in the late 2003 season,
Cold Mountain opened to a harsh
split of positive and negative reviews, with critics often praising certain aspects
of the film as genuine while also slamming entire sequences of it for being
contrived and overly-melodramatic. Directed by Academy Award-winner Anthony
Minghella (
The English Patient and
The Talented Mr. Ripley, among
others) and based on Charles Frazier's best-selling Civil War novel of the same
name, the film tells the story of a wounded confederate soldier (Jude Law) who
deserts his unit and makes a perilous journey through North Carolina to be with his
pre-war love, Ada (Nicole Kidman). Meanwhile, Ada attempts to survive on her own
while reviving her father's farm with the help of a more spirited female survivor,
Ruby (Renee Zellweger). The film alternates between treatments of romance, large
landscapes, chase sequences, and the horrors of war, and it is generally the
inconsistent treatment of these scenes compared to each other that seems to have
drawn negative criticism about the project. It was supported by an unusually high
budget for a Miramax film, and the soundtrack was immediately thought by the studio
to be one of the more successful aspects of the entire production. The genre of
music that was chosen for the era and location of the film was a historical
variation on bluegrass, as to be expected, and the studio was quick to recognize
the potential of that genre in soundtracks after the monumentally huge success of
the music from
O Brother, Where Art Thou?. Thus, they hired producer T-Bone
Burnett (a Grammy-winner for organizing that project) to duplicate the success for
Cold Mountain. Miramax, with their sniffers pointed in the direction of a
"best song" Oscar nomination or win, even went so far as to hire Elvis Costello
and Sting to each write a song for the soundtrack, and despite early indications that
they would sing for the occasion, these performances never materialized on album.
In the end, a more humble collection of somber bluegrass tunes was combined with an
equally somber score by composer Gabriel Yared for the overall package. As you
could expect, however, the restrained approach for
Cold Mountain makes it a
180 degree turn from the faster-paced enthusiasm of
O Brother, Where Art
Thou?. The soundtrack in the film and on album alternates between traditional
bluegrass pieces and modern bluegrass adaptations of those ideas, all performed by
the same, contemporary voices.
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In some cases, an argument could be made that the style of the
vocals is too polished in a contemporary sense to really bring out the
historically accurate qualities of the traditional tunes, and bluegrass
collectors should be aware of this flaw before diving into this album without
hearing its application in the film. Returning for T-Bone Burnett is the voice of
Alison Krauss, but this time her performances are so tentative that they lose
their appeal. Likewise, the songs performed by Jack White are lackluster in
energy and genuine bluegrass spirit. Only in the latter half of the album does a
more heartening sound take effect; Cassie Franklin finally puts some defiance
into the female vocals, and the two tracks by the Sacred Harp Singers (recorded
with fantastic authenticity in an old wooden-framed church) are easily the
highlight of the album. All of the bluegrass music will likely seem like a
foreign world to score collectors interested in Gabriel Yared's work for the
film. There can't be any greater difference between the fiddle, banjo, and
mandolin performances by the ensembles for the songs and the orchestral
composition for the score. This difference alone causes the album serious
trouble, because bluegrass listeners will be bored to death by Yared's typical,
meandering string writing. Even for score collectors, the album won't be worth
the price for the fifteen minutes (in four tracks) of score material, because it
is music that owners of Yared's albums have heard again and again. Having
collaborated with the same director for
The English Patient (and winning
the Oscar for that effort), some might have expected something more than a
repetition of his sullen, uninteresting string writing for
Sylvia just a
few months earlier. But even his title theme, performed in extended sequences by
piano and strings, is dragged on and on, taking forever to complete its own
statements and giving the whole chamber score a wishy-washy effect on the
listener. There is nothing here to indicate that there are chases, battles, or
even anything historical about the score. Yared failed to incorporate anything
related to the genre of the film, or the bluegrass soundtrack, and he was thus a
predictably curious choice to compose music for this film despite his
collaboration with the director. Overall, everything seems out of place, and for
the package to have worked to any listenable degree, the songs and score needed
to be separated into two distinct albums. Yared did release a promotional CD of
his score that helped him earn Golden Globe and Academy Award nominations for his
work, but this recognition likely came via reputation only, and even score
collectors may not be impressed by Yared's promo. For both Yared and Burnett, the
lesson was that you sometimes just can't recapture the same magic a second time.
** Amazon.com Price Hunt: CD or Download
| Bias Check: | For Gabriel Yared reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating
is 3.11 (in 10 reviews)
and the average viewer rating is 3.29
(in 17,992 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.
|
The insert includes extensive credits, but no information about the score
or film.
