: (John Barry) So much had been known about
Charlie Chaplin's movies and the public persona he attempted to enhance
in his own autobiography, and yet the significant (and, to some extent,
self-imposed) troubles in his personal life went largely undocumented
until Sir Richard Attenborough attempted a revealing bio-epic of the
early film star in 1992. As to be expected from this sort of
Attenborough venture, the film's scope was grand and the acting credits
contained a dozen well-known names. In the title role, Robert Downey Jr.
(like Chaplin himself, mired in legal trouble) is convincing both
aesthetically and in mannerism, and the film is littered with other high
quality performances. But the major faults of the film are the pace at
which it steams through Chaplin's life, the emphasis on the sex and
other turmoil (an encounter with J. Edgar Hoover is invented to explain
that a snub of Hoover by Chaplin at a party is a reason why the FBI
pursued Chaplin as a Communist during his later days), as well as the
flashback format of the film that includes Anthony Hopkins attempting to
get the juicier details out of Chaplin before his decline in the 1970's.
Despite these critical complaints about the project, Attenborough's film
received some recognition during awards season, and an Academy Award
nomination was given to John Barry for his dramatic underscore; it would
be the last nomination for the man who had won four "Best Score" Oscars
from the late 1960's through the early 1990's.
Barry had met Attenborough back when Barry was still
the nameplate on a jazz group, and Attenborough hired Barry to one of
his first film score assignments to provide additional jazz source music
for
The L-Shaped Room. After a collaboration that lasted a few
years, the director and composer would never be able to work together
until
Chaplin, and despite the great anticipation of their
reunion, reports indicate that Attenborough was originally horrified by
Barry's title theme for
Chaplin. But after matching Barry's theme
for the character with the tragic opening scene (in which Chaplin is
seen taking off his makeup), Attenborough was brought to tears. In the
1990's, Barry's music was becoming far more predictable, with his slow,
rolling, lushly romantic style finding fewer and fewer applications on
the screen. This style had worked so well in
Out of Africa and
Dances With Wolves that he won Oscars for those efforts, and in
so doing had created a situation in which anything similar for films
thereafter would be considered by many to be re-hash. To some extent,
his work for
Chaplin is highly derivative, though this would be
one of the last (if not the final) film for which this music would be a
perfect match. Epic tragedy has never been captured quite as well as
Barry had accomplished in the last two decades of his career, and his
quiet piano and string score for
Chaplin is both predictably
deliberate and melodramatic.
A delicate piano theme yields to several subthemes
throughout the film, all moving at an extremely slow tempo and
exhibiting the same chord progressions and bass string/cello
counterpoint technique that was heard in
Raise the Titanic,
High Road to China, and
Out of Africa. Pleasant to the
last note, each of Barry's themes is simple in construction and
painstakingly emphasized in every note. For veterans of film music,
these quietly meandering themes will be exactly as expected, so the far
more interesting parts of
Chaplin will be Barry's more upbeat,
out-of-character cues for dancing and the physical moving of Chaplin
from London to California. These cues are set to light snare rhythms and
pulsating brass, eventually dancing with woodblocks in parts that
emulated Rachel Portman's more playful moments. The two "Roll Dance"
cues show a glimpse of the old big band and
Monte Walsh days for Barry, with the second
one offering a snazzy brass rhythm over honky tonk piano. Barry also
shows skill in adapting Chaplin's own musical compositions into his
score, making generous usage of the "Smile" theme. There is a definite
reason why the Downey Jr. club vocal version of "Smile" wasn't heard in
the film; to do so would probably have killed Attenborough from
humiliation. As with most of Barry's albums, the recording and mixing of
Chaplin is exquisite, with the layered strings and delicate piano
easily distinguishable in crystal clear quality. One of the last truly
effective John Barry scores,
Chaplin will be an easy and
pleasurable listening experience for any of his collectors.
**** @Amazon.com: CD or
Download
| Bias Check: |
For John Barry reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.85
(in 27 reviews)
and the average viewer rating is 3.57
(in 26,645 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.
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