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Sleeping with the Enemy: (Jerry Goldsmith) Movies
about sexual obsession and formulaic stalkers have rarely started as
well as
Sleeping with the Enemy did in its opening scenes. In her
first major role after
Pretty Woman, a timid Julia Roberts is
emotionally and physically brutalized by her financier husband. He
flaunts her beauty at parties while abusing her as a servant at home,
and the early beachfront scenes in the film are filled with the promise
of a dramatic and thoughtful plot. But after the wife flees several
states away, tries to change her identity, and is confronted by the
terror of her husband coming after her, the film becomes one of those
cheap thrillers that hopes you actually believe the badguy is dead when
he's got one last stab to go. Despite directing a few cult favorites in
previous years, Joseph Ruben missed the mark with
Sleeping with the
Enemy, providing a stereotypical plot reminiscent of
Fatal
Attraction and filled to the brim with outrageous fallacies of
logic. After being shunned by critics, the film made modest returns with
only its star power to attract attention. One element of the film that
proved to be somewhat awkward in the finished product was Jerry
Goldsmith's mostly upbeat score. The legendary composer had transformed
his horror scores from the grand scope of the
Poltergeist and
The Omen franchises into electronically assisted, less obvious
variations for the smaller, more seedy horror projects he would accept
in the early 1990's. Surprisingly, despite the film fitting this mold
quite well,
Sleeping with the Enemy has little to do with the
prevailing attitudes of scores like
Malice and
Basic
Instinct at roughly the same time. The score has its fair share of
suspenseful moments and thud-inducing horror twists, but at its core is
a melodic score that seems to indicate that Goldsmith was feeding off of
the beauty of Roberts' character rather than the shades of Patrick
Bergin's anger.
As a result of the constant pull of the innocence of
Roberts' character on Goldsmith's attention,
Sleeping with the
Enemy is a score with conflicting personalities. The theme that
Goldsmith provides for the wife is as consistently charming as any the
composer has ever written... for a drama or a children's film. And he
doesn't try to fool you with it. The lofty woodwind solos over tingling
electronics and high strings (and other lightly pulsating woodwinds) are
just as gorgeous and soothing in the opening scenes as they are in "A
Brave Girl" and at the finale of the picture. The theme and its
instrumentation is absolutely trademark 1990's Goldsmith style, and the
simplicity of the theme, along with its repetitive use, will remain in
your head long after the score is over. Goldsmith allows a slight
variant of this woodwind theme to be carried solely by string layers, as
in the middle portions of "The Funeral," and the dramatic progression of
these performances will remind you of the shameless John Barry drama
technique (with similarities to
High Road to China,
coincidentally). The same cue also begins with a token nod to Bernard
Herrmann's
Cape Fear score --one of the greatest
stalking/thriller scores in its effectiveness-- with meandering, rising
string lines, tolling of chimes, and eerie pulsations from muted
trumpets. Unlike Goldsmith's horror scores, in which the brass often
punctuate horror jabs with rowdy hits, the moments of horror in
Sleeping with the Enemy are treated to electronic clanging
instead, with "The Carnival" and "Remember This" relying on textures
from Goldsmith's synthetic library that we would rarely hear in other
scores. These cues by no means represent Goldsmith's better half of
suspense or horror scoring; in fact, you'll likely forget the five to
seven minutes of suspense writing in the latter half of the score. The
final cue returns to the deliberate beauty of the opening cue, but with
an even faster and thicker bed of electronics. On album, the dozen or so
minutes of score that you'll want to include on your compilations are
completely exempt from the horror genre, so the music that you will get
from
Sleeping with the Enemy will have nothing to do with your
expectations as a first-time listener. In the film, it's a mixed bag,
but with superior sound quality and considerable airtime for the primary
theme, the album is a solid investment for Goldsmith collectors.
****
| Bias Check: | For Jerry Goldsmith reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating
is 3.22 (in 111 reviews)
and the average viewer rating is 3.36
(in 120,039 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.
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The insert includes no extra information about the score or film.
