: (Clint Eastwood) The transformation of
Clint Eastwood into a director of bittersweet, weighty dramas continues
with 2008's
, a vintage police story with early
aspirations of Oscar gold. Unfortunately for Eastwood and Universal
Pictures, the film failed to meet any of its expectations, revealing
significant production problems that caused audiences to quickly lose
interest in the director's newest heartbreaker. The story by "Babylon 5"
creator J. Michael Straczynski was the frequent target of early
criticism for
. He attempts to balance two unique
storylines and slowly bring them together at the end of the film, though
there is no doubt that the half of the plot dealing with a single mother
and her lost son is the stronger element. The mostly-true story from
1928 Los Angeles follows the corruption of the city police and the
mother's desperate search for her real son when the police offer another
boy in his place. A parallel story involves a serial killer whose murder
of boys at the same time in Southern California generated another famous
investigation. Along with Straczynski's script, Angelina Jolie's lead
performance also did not live up to initial hype, dulling an already
morbidly grim subject. For film score collectors, the prospect of
another Eastwood film featuring his own score writing abilities is cause
for a collective groan, since nearly all of his compositional work has
been badly underdeveloped in his previous attempts to score his own
productions. As a pianist with a musically talent family, Eastwood
obviously enjoys writing these themes for his scores and giving them a
general orchestral direction.
Eastwood once again employs Lennie Niehaus to help
flesh out his ideas, as well as his son Kyle to provide some of the
performances. Despite being previously nominated for a Golden Globe for
his score writing efforts, Eastwood's music is, on a technical level,
that of an amateur, someone who does not employ the finer tactics of
orchestral writing to give depth or density to his thematic ideas. Even
with Niehaus expanding upon Eastwood's themes to give the score a
marginally effective bed of sound, there are several technical problems
with the recording that cannot be attributed to anything other than an
overly simplistic approach to the writing. It's functional work at the
most basic level, and therefore avoids the lowest marks. But this kind
of film needs much more than functional music. Those harsh on Eastwood
for these attempts (which were practically laughable in
Flags of Our
Fathers) have said that you could drag many of the punks targeted by
"Dirty Harry" Callahan into a scoring studio and receive much of the
same result. Eastwood's passion for music makes such statements a cheap
shot, but he simply cannot avoid the due criticism relating to his
simplistic music. His writing for
Changeling revolves around a
single theme passed around to different performers with a soft string
section of about 30 members quietly providing basic backing. The piano,
guitar, trumpet, bass, saxophone, and clarinet alternate sparse
performances of this theme without any counterpoint or alteration to
account for emotional shifts on screen. It's lounge music of the most
intimate nature translated into a slightly broader canvas by Neihaus in
an attempt to serve the picture. The solo trumpet performances are an
obvious grasp at a film noir sound.
The secondary plot of investigation is given synthetic
vocal effects over lengthy dissonant phrases that do nothing more than
increase the volume rather than expand upon any sense of complexity. For
a film involving corruption, there is remarkably little convincing
turbulence. The monothematic world of the single mother, graceful in
musical tone even when distraught in character, has no musical relation
to the serial killer half of the story, and the latter cluster of cues
(led by the lengthy "We Killed Some Kids" and "Davey Tells Story") is
nothing short of obnoxious. Eastwood and Neihaus will likely argue that
the subdued nature of the music suffices for the internal drama on
display in the film, just as they likely argued with
Million Dollar
Baby or
Mystic River. But in the case of
Changeling,
there is simply no adequate excuse for regurgitating the same general
sound for this context. On album, the problem is compounded by a
41-minute presentation that drags on for what seems like an eternity.
The elegance of the solos in the long "End Title" recording would easily
suffice to represent this entire score. There is no doubt that
Changeling is a dramatic heavyweight of a film that could have
greatly benefited from smart thematic manipulation, counterpoint, a
mixing of major and minor keys, better representation of the period in
time, and a gradual shift in tone as the mother's level of desperation
increases throughout the picture. None of these finer aspects of film
score writing are to be heard in
Changeling, and for that reason
alone, Eastwood continues to sell his own films short by insisting on
writing the music. Perhaps he's just feeling lucky, but even if he makes
his own day by writing this music, he remains a detriment to his
cause.
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