Filmtracks Recommends:
Buy it... if a collection of beautiful highlights from the original music by both Burkhart Dallwitz and Philip Glass for this film await your rearrangement into a highly compelling, if not simplistic new age style of listening experience. Avoid it... if you rightfully expect the director's choices of the application of this music to the film to match the intellectual and thought-provoking nature of the plot itself, because The Truman Show remains one of the most excruciating missed opportunities for dual scores in recent cinema. Filmtracks Editorial Review:
The Truman Show: (Burkhart Dallwitz/Philip Glass) There's so much to love and loath about the 1998 drama The Truman Show by Peter Weir, and for those studying the impact of mass media on society, it opens countless doors to lengthy debate. Among its greatest assets is its incredible originality, a trait pushed heavily by Paramount at the time of the film's release amidst summer blockbusters of the normal action variety. It's a thinking man's film, postulating about the impact of the fictional, longest-running television show in history on its star. The catch is that the star doesn't realize that he is the subject of the show, filmed by thousands of hidden cameras and surrounded by actors for his entire life. His struggle to realize his identity and eventually escape from the massive town-sized bubble that serves as the studio set is the literal plotline, though issues of God relations and media manipulation are unfortunately left wanting in the production's unexpectedly short running time. Therein lie the catastrophic problems with The Truman Show. While the exploration of all the facets of the production is fascinating to both view and contemplate, the film is perhaps the most disturbing tale of abuse ever conceived. The plot seems to ignore the facts that the civil rights of Jim Carrey's title character are unequivocally violated and the cost of such a production at startup would never be acceptable to any studio. And what about this man's sex life? Can't a guy masturbate in the living room without a studio producer waiting for him to finish? These overwhelming fallacies of logic are devastating counterweights to the originality of the tale and some of the minimal humor conveyed in its early scenes (the "It Could Happen to You" poster of an airplane impaled by lightning in the travel agency office is nothing less than classic and should have been marketed as one of the film's alternate posters). Nevertheless, the film was an enormous success and finally allowed Carrey to leave his rubbery slapstick mannerisms aside. One of the most interesting conundrums created by Weir is the role of music in The Truman Show. It exists on two levels, one meant to address the broadcast of the show and thus aimed at its fictional viewers within the tale, and a second meant to actually score the overarching film itself. An extremely intelligent dual-employment of music in The Truman Show was seemingly the intent of Weir, but as he has a tendency to do, he loses track of a score's overall consistency in the process of searching for the right piece of music for each individual scene. This has been a habit that has ruined the flow of the music in many of his films, 2003's Master and Commander another prime example. Not surprisingly, the music ultimately employed for The Truman Show suffers from the exact same functional dilemma as the film's concept. The soundtrack has so much going for it, sometimes reaching the boundaries of brilliance, and yet it misses so many opportunities to form a truly powerful whole. It is purely the result of a Weir methodology that takes a day's shoot and then mixes over it all sorts of existing music to hear what kind of approach might work. Inevitably, some of that music ends up staying in the picture and thus limits any chances of a cohesive overall soundtrack from existing. In the case of The Truman Show, Weir decided to settle upon the music of Philip Glass to represent the real life side of the film's story, utilizing several (questionable) pieces from Glass' scores of the 1980's and 1990's alongside a few original recordings by the composer. Why not hire Glass to write another ten minutes of original music instead for continuity purposes? Alternately, to address the music intended to be heard as part of the show within the film, Weir went with little-known Australian composer Burkhart Dallwitz. The differences between the two composers' styles is easily distinguishable; despite the fact that Dallwitz also uses a piano extensively as the central personality of his cues, there isn't much of an effort made to clearly plan the direction of the two styles outside of a stream of consciousness mode of addressing each scene by Weir. Seeing the show's orchestra actually perform in the heartbreakingly beautiful "Reunion" scene is the kind of teasing that could have been explored better in the film, establishing Dallwitz's material as representing the show's. But if Glass' music was meant to represent Ed Harris' God-like producer and the larger concept as a whole, which makes sense given the more cerebral and procedural aspects of his writing (the almost mechanical rhythms are appropriate here), then Weir allows too much bleeding of the lines to make that distinction work. The Glass and Dallwitz material is never assigned cleanly enough to the two roles of music in the film to realize the potential that this soundtrack obviously had. For those not interested in pondering such intellectual issues, there is still some gorgeous music to be heard in The Truman Show. The Dallwitz material has a contemporary feel in its keyboarding and electronic embellishments (something that doesn't really match the retro art direction of the show, which is another continuity problem with the soundtrack), soothingly pretty from the Enya imitation "It's a Life" to "Truman Sets Sail." The aforementioned "Reunion" overcomes its basic structures to stun with redemptive harmony and a well-mixed piano over a string ensemble. Two individual standout cues by Dallwitz include the edgy percussion, keyboarding, and electric guitars of "Drive" and the intriguingly optimistic chopping of "A New Life," an unused cue with wicked violin solos at its conclusion. The remainder of Dallwitz's contribution is underwhelming at best, inaudibly droning at worst. The opening "Trutalk" cue is inhibited on the soundtrack album by the introductory dialogue describing the show in the film. The Glass music has to be divided into two halves: his existing material, which is synthetically obnoxious in most of its applications, and his original work for this film, which is far lovelier in the later, more intoxicating Glass sense. The trio of "Dreaming of Fiji," "Truman Sleeps," and "Raising the Sail" offers some much needed consistency in the thematic department, these three cues offering really the only truly cohesive melodic identity for the lead character and his aspirations. How does all of this fit together? That's the problemÉ It doesn't. It's amazing how the concept of two composers for two scores for the same film, as well as a handful of clearly effective cues amounting to five to ten minutes of great music from each composer, can be so thoroughly wasted by Weir's poor direction of those elements in the finished product. As previously stated, some listeners won't care. They may even enjoy the Wojciech Kilar and Frederic Chopin pieces inserted into the mix. The album sold incredibly well for an entire decade because of such appeal. But at the end of the day, it's hard not to be disappointed by the feeling that the score (or two scores) for The Truman Show were a tremendously missed opportunity for intellectual depth of the kind never heard in a film's soundtrack before. *** Track Listings:
Total Time: 56:30
* original score by Buckhard Dallwitz ** original score by Philip Glass All artwork and sound clips from The Truman Show are Copyright © 1998, Milan Entertainment/BMG. 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 11/23/09, updated 11/23/09. Review Version 4.1 - PHP (Filmtracks Publications). Copyright © 2009-2013, Christian Clemmensen. All rights reserved. |
