Filmtracks Traffic Rank: #807
Written 3/7/01, Revised 2/6/09
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Buy it... only if you seek a faithful representation of the turbulent
musical transformation heard within the film, because the source piano
performances featured in the story expose their troubled character even more when
heard on their own.
Avoid it... if only a few minutes of harmonically resonating, classically
pleasing symphonic cues under the rambling piano performances in the latter half
of the score cannot compensate for the primal ambience of the first half.
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| Blanchard |
The Caveman's Valentine: (Terence Blanchard) Once in a while,
there are award-magnet dramatic films in which a certain genre of music or a
particular instrument plays such an integral role in the plot that the soundtrack's
source material is meant to dominate the film. Such an example is The Caveman's
Valentine, a film in which the primary character, a highly talented Julliard
graduate of classical music played by Samuel L. Jackson, lives as a madman in a
cave outside of New York City. As a classically trained pianist and composer, the
character of Romulus (or Rom, as he comes to be known) lives his existence in an
alternate reality while digressing into unorganized fits of classical piano
compositions of his past and future. As the character is drawn back into the real
world during his investigation of a murder near his cave, he begins composing for
piano once again, producing a haunting and occasionally delirious result. With that
kind of storyline at the film's center, composer Terence Blanchard, whose
background was actually rooted in jazz, was unleashed to write classically
inclined, but edgy piano pieces for use as source material to be performed in
The Caveman's Valentine. Blanchard had previously worked with the same
director to produce an above average score for Eve's Bayou a few year prior,
and was perhaps best known for his score to Malcolm X. Both the film and
score of The Caveman's Valentine, however, suffer from the madness of its
own main character. Because of Rom's instability and obvious talent, the score
jumps all over the place with no intended sense of continuity to bring the entire
soundtrack together. Sometimes Blanchard reverts to lengthy sequences of brooding
percussion and primal sound effects, while at other times bursting out with
powerful and sophisticated piano performances accompanied by the Northwest
Sinfonia. Because the film also involves paranoia and murder, the score is
intentionally a dark affair, with not even its climax experiencing a final,
completely harmonically positive note. On the creative side, Blanchard succeeds
tremendously in the task of getting into Rom's mind; the opening titles of the film
are scored with a one minute tuning session of the orchestra; anyone who's ever
been to a symphony will recognize this unique sound, and it is a fabulous way to
begin the score and film.
Because Romulus spends much of the first half of the film in the
lonely madness of his cave, Blanchard's score for this majority of time is consumed
by the eerie, percussive sound effects of banging trash cans, primal calls, and the
usual synthesized groans of introverted reflection. Even when the classical piano
music begins appearing through the clouds, the pace and tone of their performances
is rough and undisciplined. The piano solos by Blanchard and Awadagin Pratt are
jumpy and far less eloquent than those of, for instance, Patrick Doyle's
East-West or Joel McNeely's
Lover's Prayer from the previous year.
Nevertheless, the sheer volume and speed of their duets is an impressive feat; as
the album comes to a close, they pick up a significant amount of momentum towards
their fully symphonic accompaniment. And yet, the unquestionably disturbed mental
condition of Rom is never quite shaken in the music. From start to end, the
listening experience on album is unsettling in its turbulent rhythms. Critics of
the film stated that it fails because of its lack of focus and tendency to wander
off into bizarre visions of madness (mirrored by the sound effect in the middle of
"Now"). To his credit, Blanchard scores the film with equal ferocity, and this
close reflection of the character's evolution is what makes the album for
The
Caveman's Valentine a very difficult listening experience. The first half of
the product is a wasteland of paranoid delusions, and the maturing piano
performances of the second half only feature one or two harmonically enjoyable
moments. The primary theme that emerges in "Caveman Outside the Cave" and reappears
in "The Letter" and "Now" is a symphonic marvel, but its performances are far
too short to save the album as a whole. The same applies to the sparingly employed
solemn acoustic guitar performances that attempt to add warmth to the equation. The
album is, however, presented well. In the middle of over an hour of original music,
you hear a featured opera performance from the film. The Northwest Sinfonia, which
often showed a lack of size and experience in many score recordings at the time,
performs with a superior level of intensity for
The Caveman's Valentine,
perhaps inspired by the role for the piano performances by Blanchard and Pratt. To
get to the meat of the album, however, you have to jump to the final ten tracks
(when Rom begins to join the real world once again). Unfortunately, Blanchard did
so well in portraying the turbulence in Rom's mind that the score's overall
character on the album is dramatically forbidding and depressing.
*** @Amazon.com: CD or
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