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Stanley & Iris: (John Williams) Despite its promise
at small venues and with awards voters,
Stanley & Iris was
slammed by critics left and right and lost the interest of audiences
almost immediately after its 1990 debut. With a screenplay written by
husband-and-wife team Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank Jr., and directed
by veteran Martin Ritt shortly before his death, the film reunited the
team that brought
Norma Rae and, more recently,
Murphy's
Romance to the big screen. The purpose of the film was to make a
statement about illiteracy, posing Jane Fonda as a working class widow
attempting to befriend and teach Robert DeNiro, a working class
illiterate, how to read and write. Despite a solid supporting cast of
actors typecast from previous successes like
Moonstruck and
Parenthood, the movie was sunk by Fonda's unrealistic and
unsympathetic performance in a title role, one that eased her into
retirement from acting thereafter. Poor dialogue and predictable
plotlines have continued to cause laughter of a mean-spirited nature
many years later, and while ardent fans of composer John Williams may
not want to hear it, the score doesn't help
Stanley & Iris much
either. Nestled in between Williams' lofty and adventuresome scores of
1989 and 1990,
Stanley & Iris represents one of the composer's
relieving deviations from his fully orchestral exercises in bombast that
he tended to take once every two or three years at the time.
Unfortunately, his respite in the soft warmth of light character drama
could not salvage the film and did little to further his own career
path. In many ways, the film lacks spark, personality, and any kind of
memorable touch to distinguish itself from other character dramas, and
the exact same statement can be made about Williams' music. Over the
years, the status of the score's album as a collectible caused an aura
of desirability that many fans seem to feel towards
Stanley &
Iris. Not surprisingly, some film music critics hail
Stanley &
Iris as a superior effort from the maestro, but when you look at it
with the perspective of Williams' larger career in mind, the composer
really did nothing to meet his own high standards by injecting much
needed inspiration into the film. As such, the score is one of his rare
failures.
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Despite its flaws, Williams' music for
Stanley &
Iris is pretty and respectful. It reminds of a more innocent time
and place, just as scores like
A Patch of Blue and
Raggedy
Man existed in the same role for Jerry Goldsmith. But Williams'
subdued character scores, with
The Accidental Tourist most recent
at the time, fluctuate greatly between the magical and the mundane, and
Stanley & Iris gravitates towards the latter. Designed for piano,
woodwinds, and strings, the score's tempos are relaxing and its volumes
are restrained. Its two sweet themes are simple and repetitive, drawing
similar performances from piano and flute in several cues. The piano is
the heart of the urban piece, often setting a soothing rhythm in the
background while a woodwind performs a central theme in the middle
ranges and a moderate string section provides your elevator music-like
accompaniment in higher ranges. An occasional trumpet and French horn
repeat the same themes again, utilizing familiar rhythms. Then it's the
cellos. Then it's back to the piano. Only once does Williams' piano spur
the score into showing signs of life; at the start of "The Bicycle," the
faster, more ambitious performance emphasis from the opening of
E.T.
The Extra-Terrestrial's "Over the Moon" concert piece get the cue
rolling with gusto. The composer had already proven himself capable of
providing truly engrossing music in the form of smaller character
themes, having done so specifically for the director several decades
prior in
Conrack. There were restrained sections of
Hook
that did just that concurrently, and from the same year, the family
theme from
Presumed Innocent, which shares many characteristics
with the
Stanley & Iris melody (as heard in the opening and
closing cues on the album), express similar ideas with much more
authenticity. The usual, brilliant twists of key and rhythm aren't
present in
Stanley & Iris; it is about as simple-minded as the
composer can get, and compared to his usual level of complexity, the
score fails to maintain much interest. The album from Varèse
Sarabande is only 29 minutes in length and fell out of print only a few
years after production. Although another pressing eventually resurfaced
and normalized its price, it was always curious to see collectors shell
out over $50 for
Stanley & Iris, because it is among Williams'
most underachieving and ineffective scores in the digital era.
** Amazon.com Price Hunt: CD or Download
| Bias Check: | For John Williams reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating
is 3.73 (in 68 reviews)
and the average viewer rating is 3.6
(in 334,382 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.
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