Filmtracks Recommends:
Buy it... if you desire one of Richard Robbins' few truly engaging and cohesive scores for a movie from Merchant Ivory Productions, this one generating more interest in its motifs and instrumentation than most of its peers. Avoid it... if you demand a competent recording and mixing of your film music, this score absolutely butchered on its album presentation to such a degree that the bass region is completely mangled and distorted beyond recognition. Filmtracks Editorial Review:
The Remains of the Day: (Richard Robbins) During the four decades of filmmaking by Merchant Ivory Productions, the times never got better than the early 1990's. The pair of Howards End and The Remains of the Day represented the pinnacle of achievements by director James Ivory and producer Ismail Merchant, earning substantial awards recognition for their style of filmmaking and raking in the greatest fiscal returns of their collaboration. To the benefit of the 1993 entry, The Remains of the Day, glowing response from Howards End and a reunion of lead actors Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson yielded tremendous interest in the otherwise fairly typical topic for the Merchant Ivory focus. Hopkins plays the head butler of a respected and stately 1930's English manor and his sole purpose in life is to preserve the tradition and order of the past in his supervision and teaching of the younger generation of servants. During his tenure, the owner of the estate engages in several high stakes political conferences at the residence, eventually revealing himself to be a Nazi appeaser and bringing disgrace to the manor. An even greater test for the butler is the arrival of the head housemaid played by Thompson, who eventually falls in love with the butler but is unable to coax the rigid man out of his dutiful persona. Decades later, after she leaves the employment of the manor, they reconcile to a degree but are left to contend with love unrealized as the butler returns to serve a new, American owner of the mansion (Christopher Reeve, in a notable appearance just before his paralyzing accident). Among the notable Merchant Ivory collaborators to return for duties on The Remains of the Day was composer Richard Robbins, who had split the series' assignments with Richard Bennett but who remains the better known name because of his work on the most famous entries. While Robbins' music for these movies was always serviceable, it never tended to draw attention to itself. In his two Oscar-nominated efforts, this and Howards End, his music was somewhat overshadowed by source placements in the film, though whereas the earlier score truly did not deserve its recognition, the original music for The Remains of the Day is far better in accomplishing its goals for the narrative. Never should you expect to be blown away by a Robbins score, and in this case, there are some disastrous sound issues as well, but this 1993 score does at least have some interesting ideas and lasting highlights. Unlike Howards End, which is a mess of a score in terms of cohesive development, this one is very tightly organized and features several smart rhythmic and instrumental techniques. Robbins focused squarely on the cyclical, nearly mechanized nature of the butler's duty to perfection in The Remains of the Day, basing the score on a rising rhythmic figure that evolves well throughout. Early on, this rhythm's base of plucked, clock-like tones is augmented (quite surprisingly) by synthesizer, giving it the appropriately cold personality necessary for the character. By the final cue, it has become increasingly organic, however, denoting perhaps some small softening in the butler's nature. The theme that Robbins explores above this rhythm is a bit generic, but it maintains its tortured personality through the end, representing an interesting balance of 1950's Bernard Herrmann undulation and 1970's John Williams progressions of lament. By "Loss and Separation," the rhythm has been transferred to woodwinds and the theme to saxophone, the warmest expression of romance you'll likely find from Robbins for one of these films. While this theme dominates early and late in the score, the composer does explore less imposing ground in between. Starting in "The Keyhole and the Chinaman" and culminating in "The Cooks in the Kitchen," Robbins uses woodblocks in haphazard rhythms to spice up the inner-workings of the servants at the manor, the latter cue among the composer's most manically playful career moments. The end of "Tradition and Order" generates the same feeling as well, an interesting twist on the stateliness that you'd expect to hear from Robbins for this occasion. Some of that stature does present itself in "The Conference Begins," which is one of the score's striking applications of trumpet-led orchestral melody. There are moments of somber toil in this score that rely solely open the rumbling of the main rhythmic figure, "Sir Geoffrey Wren and Stevens, Sr." and "You Mean a Great Deal to This House" taking the motif into a realm similar to Jerry Goldsmith's Islands in the Stream. A pair of source tracks, a Schubert opera piece and a vintage performance of "Blue Moon," offer lengthy breaks from the otherwise consistent flow of the score. Unfortunately for the album experience of The Remains of the Day, there is severe audio distortion during moments of even moderate volume. You first hear this distortion during the timpani-pounding moments late in "Opening Titles, Darlington Hall" and it eventually swallows up the whole soundscape in the final three score cues. Nearly unlistenable is "Loss and Separation," those sax performances rendered useless by low-end garbling of the mix. The same effect diminishes "Appeasement/In the Rain" as well, though perhaps some solace can be taken in the fact that the most dynamic cues, like "The Cooks in the Kitchen," do not suffer this problem. If not for this terrible distortion of the bass region on album, the score would be worthy of a four star rating, but so much of it is unlistenable that it's ultimately impossible to recommend the product. *** Track Listings:
Total Time: 49:23
All artwork and sound clips from The Remains of the Day are Copyright © 1993, Angel Records. The reviews and notes contained on the filmtracks.com site may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the prior written authority of Filmtracks Publications. Audio clips can be heard using RealPlayer but cannot be redistributed without the label's expressed written consent. Page created 2/21/12, updated 2/21/12. Review Version 4.1 - PHP (Filmtracks Publications). Copyright © 2012-2013, Christian Clemmensen. All rights reserved. |
