Filmtracks Traffic Rank: #357
Written 7/23/98, Revised 12/31/07
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Buy it... if you seek one of the best scores that the romantic
comedy genre has to offer, brilliantly balancing the humor of the film's
story with the gravity of its location.
Avoid it... if you expect the respectfully restrained underscore in
between the opening and closing statements of the title theme to be as
strikingly robust.
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| Shaiman |
The American President: (Marc Shaiman) Rob Reiner's
entertaining comedy is very much like the earlier Dave, a
lighthearted love story involving a White House built in the kind of
liberal fantasy world that causes conservatives to cry foul. In The
American President, Michael Douglas is a single man as the current
Hollywood dream in the Oval Office and, to the understandable curiosity
of the press, he dates a Washington lobbyist played by Annette Bening.
Their relationship, and how it helps the President regain his confidence
and his poll ratings, is a fuzzy triumph accompanied by a plethora of
cameo appearances by real-life politicians and pundits. The film is a
regular on television re-runs, a safe romantic comedy for the family
with an innocent style embodied perfectly by Marc Shaiman's orchestral
underscore. Reiner identified Shaiman's challenge in providing a score
that addressed both the political weight of the environment of the
office while also "tastefully enhancing" the emotional elements of the
humor and romance. Shaiman made a career in the 1990's out of such kinds
of scores, with Patch Adams perhaps best emulating the same
balancing act. His success with the style of The American
President would earn him an Academy Award nomination (though he was
denied the award in favor of the machine known as Alan Menken) and his
title theme would exhibit so much respectful patriotism that it would be
used in the trailers for Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan
in early 1998. While Shaiman's score had vanished from the collective
memory by then, its dramatic placement in those trailers resurrected
interest in the score and has assisted in cementing its status as one of
the best scores of its genre in the decade. The score both graces the
film with a timeless sense of grandeur and is an outstanding, consistent
listening experience on album. Harmonious for almost every minute of its
length, The American President even has a slight touch of Western
sensibility in the secondary passage of its title theme, aiding in the
portrayal of somewhat maverick behavior for the character in the context
of his office.
Shaiman's two primary themes for
The American
President are built with a lush performance in mind, led by strings
and bold counterpoint by horns. The title theme, representing the
office, is the more famous of the two, though the understated romance
theme does the majority of the work in the central portions of the film.
Shaiman doesn't restrain the title theme in any of its performances,
highlighted by "Main Title" and the two concluding cues in the film and
on album. Each performance seemingly enhances its presidential aura,
leading to a final statement with rolling snare drum at the conclusion
of "End Titles." This blatantly heroic character theme will likely be
the attraction for most score collectors, though
The American
President excels in that the remainder of its contents are equally
strong. The romance theme, often performed by piano or woodwinds, is a
solid reinforcement of the film's flighty, positive spirit in cues from
"The First Kiss" to "The Morning After," as well as several statements
in the final twenty minutes. The theme is pretty standard in Shaiman's
career (the title theme is, in fact, the one that goes above and
beyond), but a relatively short album never allows these more subdued
conversational cues to become boring. Another motif that appears twice
in the score is the more serious bass-string rhythm that accompanies the
politically procedural undertones of the story. This motif is mostly a
tense rhythmic movement in "Gathering Votes," but takes a firmer stance
with brass and snare in the impressive "Meet the Press." A lighter
version of the rhythm in "Never Have an Airline Strike at Christmas" is
an upbeat spin on this idea, leading to a source performance of Rodgers
and Hammerstein's lounge-appropriate "I Have Dreamed." Overall,
The
American President is a score that doesn't reach out and grab your
attention very often, but its consistent quality at the top of its
genre, as well as a very good recording mix, make it a pleasure every
time you revisit it. The final two tracks, totaling over twelve minutes,
are worth the album's price alone. Shaiman's similar output in the
following years would rarely capture the same enticing spirit.
**** @Amazon.com: CD or
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Bias Check:
For Marc Shaiman reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.33
(in 12 reviews) and the average viewer rating is 3.17
(in 19,632 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.
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