Filmtracks Traffic Rank: #1,200
Written 9/4/01, Revised 9/23/08
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Buy it... if you are inclined to inflict punishment on yourself or need an
instrument of annoyance for use against troublesome neighbors or roommates.
Avoid it... unless you were really drawn to the psychologically disturbing
plot of the film and seek an equally morbid souvenir from that experience.
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| Badalamenti |
Arlington Road: (Angelo Badalamenti) One of the 1990's
scariest psychological thrillers, Arlington Road is an emotionally twisted
horror film about domestic terrorism. It's one of those cliched "urban nightmare
stories" in which your newly befriended neighbor turns out to be a cold-blooded
mass bomber, a maniacal mastermind who never loses. The story is one that will keep
you on the edge of your seat for a number of scenes, though it stretches logic
beyond reasonable bounds at nearly every important turn of the plot, reducing its
overall effectiveness. The story is ultimately a futile endeavor, with every value
and/or person you care about shattered or dead, making you sit and wonder why you
have just spent two hours endeavoring to feel so bad about the humanity's basic
goodness. Nevertheless, the film has inspired something of a cult following, partly
in spite of the boycott that some conservative organizations have placed on the
film for its grotesquely bloody and disturbing opening scene (as well as a massive
explosion sequence at the end that probably wouldn't get studio approval in a post
September 11th world). Called to the task of scoring this thriller is composer
Angelo Badalamenti, who was best known at the time for his collaborations with
director David Lynch. If the film stretches your limits of believability, then so
does its music. Badalamenti was presented with the job of recording a score that
consists of two conflicting elements: a traditional orchestra and his experimental
synthetics. The basic concept of that conflict isn't a bad idea. After all, you
have a film in which the ideals of a nice, cuddly suburban neighborhood are
juxtaposed against the horror of discovering that your neighbor is a technological
mastermind of terrorist bombings. But in a project like this, the mix of the two
halves is of paramount importance, and it is here where the work only barely
suffices. The orchestra is badly underpowered and the electronics are off the far
end of the weirdness scale. The convoluted atmosphere created by their melding
causes the film to slip into a dreamy state of accelerated horror, pounding the
listener into a dull, numb haze. This may have been Badalamenti's intent in the
first place, but on album, the music fails to translate into anything other than an
equally sick souvenir from the production.
In terms of functionality, the score for
Arlington Road is
as adequate as could be expected for this film. The opening cue in the film and on
album, for a scene in which a neighbor boy stumbles bloodily down the street with
half his arm blown off, contains some of the single-handedly noisiest and
irritating music ever to exist on film, with percussive clanging and dissonant
pounding of electronics that are actually painful to the ears. As "Bloody Boy"
turns to "Neon Reprise," Badalamenti crosses over into the techno realm for a
bizarre and disjointed rhythmic effect. This cue makes similarly conceived ideas by
Howard Shore for 1990's horror efforts seem like grand, harmonic overtures. After
that frightening beginning, the score levels out into a consistent droning of
electronics and uninspired orchestral underscore. In the film, the only positive
musical presence worth mentioning is at the shell-shocked finale, when the
realization sequence of the plot pulls back and reveals the secrets of its
characters to the audience. This cue, "Aftermath," is among the only listenable
moments in the work. Otherwise, Badalamenti's music features no redeeming
characteristics, especially when heard on its own. The only notable theme,
exhibited at the end of the album, is too dapper for even this project, making the
listener wonder how the composer's usual romantic European sensibility eluded him
this time. In the vast realm of Badalamenti's works, this is about as far from
Cousins as one could get. As mentioned before, however, this score has a
very loyal following, as evidenced by opinions online. But bad music is bad music,
and when it exists for a bad film, you get an album that is destined to only
collect dust on the back shelves. A few additional cues (six minutes worth) for
Arlington Road were provided by Tom Hajdu and Andrew Milburn (otherwise
known as "Tom and Andy"), whose credits in the 1990's were highlighted by some
recognizable television commercial music. Even their contribution, using the touted
"Evolution System," is uninspired, and it blends in with Badalamenti's droning muck
without so much as an interesting new motif. Overall, this is an all-around morbid
and pointless work when divorced from the visuals. There's use for the album as a
tool of annoyance when dealing with troublesome roommates or neighbors, but that is
about all it'll be good for.
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