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| Newman |
The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel: (Thomas Newman)
There's nothing revolutionary about director John Madden's 2012
adaptation of Deborah Moggach's novel, "These Foolish Things." A
conventional ensemble cast drama,
The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel
is the type of film you respect and view for its fantastic collection of
veteran British actors, each allowed to flourish while playing retirees
escaping Britain to India for what they expect to be a luxurious
experience living in an upscale hotel offered precisely for their types.
When they arrive, the group of unrelated couples and single malcontents
discovers that all is not as advertised, and they confront the
challenges of their surroundings and their own inner demons before
eventually coming to peace in the process of making the hotel into the
best it can be. Concepts of race relations, class systems in Indian
culture, and sexual orientation are explored, but
The Best Exotic
Marigold Hotel is primarily a feel-good drama that won praise from
critics and earned over $100 million worldwide thanks to the star power
of Judi Dench, Bill Nighy, Maggie Smith, and Tom Wilkinson, among
others. The soundtracks for Madden's movies may be defined in the
memories of most casual film music collectors as belonging primarily to
his popular collaboration with Stephen Warbeck in the late 1990's and
early 2000's, though the 2010's have established for the director a new
relationship with Thomas Newman that began with
The Debt. Madden
returned to Newman for
The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel and sought
the kind of creative, ethnic mixture of familiar and exotic instrumental
tones that Newman is easily capable of generating. The composer really
is well suited for an assignment such as this one; while he often
experiments with a wide range of unconventional world instruments for
his standard dramatic scores and thus doesn't always quite connect with
the audience because of the resulting kaleidoscope of bizarre tones,
The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel is the perfect assignment in which
he could really let loose with his Bollywood inclinations. As a result,
he produces a funny and sentimental score that exists somewhere in
between Mychael Danna and A.R. Rahman territory, utilizing his standard
low-key dramatic approach in general but whipping up a mixture of
India-appropriate sounds that really suits his tendency to explore
unusual tones. The resulting score may be too foreign-sounding for some
film music listeners, but if you already have a taste for Bollywood film
music, you will be pleasantly surprised by Newman's enthusiasm and
ability to utilize regional instruments with authenticity.
The score for
The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel is
one of those extremely rare instances in which a soundtrack without any
clear thematic core or even narrative flow remains extremely effective
throughout its length due to its mere affable spirit. Newman's
instrumental palette is India-centric, of course, offering sitar and
bansuris along with other standard regional tones. Some of his more
generic world sounds, especially relating to tingling percussion and
glass effects, are once again present. A string orchestra very
effectively provides background warmth to several cues. Stealing the
show in this score, as sometimes is the case in Newman's most enticing
works, is his vocal integration, using both female and male soloists to
perform a wide range of emotional accents. The assembly of these
performers is masterfully executed in
The Best Exotic Marigold
Hotel, restrained to ambient, synthetically deep atmosphere at times
while exploding with rock-like enthusiasm at others. In between, you
have moments of beautiful solace and rousing humor, each cue
highlighting several specialty instruments in nearly constant tonal
accessibility. There is little thematic continuity to be heard in the
score, each cue a vignette of sorts. One common descending line does
meander through the score's softer passages, however, and a few of the
rhythmic ideas stated early in the score are reprised one time later in
the work. The appeal of
The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel really
exists in the fact that roughly half the cues are standalone winners,
beginning with the most typically Newmanesque one, "The Chimes at
Midnight," a purely lovely and relaxing plucked string, tingling
percussion, and soothing vocal passage. A bit more engaging is "Assault
on the Senses," which beautifully rotates through breathy woodwind
performances over strings while hanging on notes within a progression in
trademark Newman fashion. Highlighting the rowdier cues is the pair of
"Progress" and "A Bit of Afters" near the conclusion, utilizing a common
female vocal motif over spirited guitar and drum rhythms that are
extraordinarily upbeat in their affirming tone, the latter exhibiting
Rahman's bright sensibilities. Bracketing either end of the score in
between are the relaxing atmospheric cues for male voice ("The Best
Exotic Marigold Hotel" and "Young Wasim") and the outright wild humor
with aggressive group vocal exhales in "Tuk Tuks" and "Do Your Worst,"
the latter strangely reminiscent of Eric Serra's
The Fifth
Element. Several other cues deserve mentioning, but you really have
to experience the soundtrack for
The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel
to appreciate why its individual parts function so well as a whole.
Newman clearly had fun with this score, and as long as you don't have an
aversion to stereotypical Indian musical tones, that spirit will be
contagious.
**** @Amazon.com: CD or
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| Bias Check: |
For Thomas Newman reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.16
(in 32 reviews)
and the average viewer rating is 3.12
(in 55,767 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.
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