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| Portman |
Chocolat: (Rachel Portman) When the crew of Oscar contender
The Cider House Rules reunited the following year for
Chocolat,
expectations from Miramax were once again high. Lasse Hallstrom's film about a small
French town's reaction to a new chocolate shop and its controversial owner in the
late 1950's was exposed as an excess of fluff that was short on substance, wasting a
talented cast with a shallow plotline and failing to adequately frame its extremely
weightless comedy into a dramatic mould that could have elevated its appeal.
Nominated for Academy Awards for her work on both
The Cider House Rules and
Chocolat was composer Rachel Portman, undoubtedly the darling of the industry
at the time. Unlike the melodramatic gravity of her composition for
The Cider
House Rules, Portman's music for
Chocolat takes several necessary steps
back and plays a far less obvious role in the picture. Producing an adequate
soundscape for a sensitive romantic drama is a task that the composer could complete
in her sleep, and some parts of
Chocolat are so drab that you may believe that
she was indeed snoozing while writing. But, as usual, Portman inserts a few wildly
infectious cues of spirit and melody, and it is this material, along with a couple of
standard capitulations of her normal style of tender string theme that earned this
score its Golden Globe and Oscar nominations. To say that this score was heavily
overrated at the time of these nominations is a massive understatement; the
popularity of the Miramax/Hallstrom duo likely caused the music for
Chocolat
to receive the attention that Portman deserved for
The Legend of Bagger Vance
instead. The lesser known score is by far more engaging in its instrumental and
thematic constructs, creating a magical personality that was relatively rare in
Portman's larger body of purely functional works. Even though
Chocolat is not
as broad in scope and consistently entertaining as
The Legend of Bagger Vance,
Portman on auto-pilot produces a result still competitive with the average romantic
or dramatic score of the era.
Typecast into producing this variety of music for arthouse films,
Portman's talent for effectively scoring such topics was beginning to result in a
tiresome repetition of style for even her most avid listeners. This score's
foundation will be highly familiar. The basic melodic structures typical to Portman's
works, along with their usual style of feather-light performances by strings and
woodwinds, exist in full force here. The themes are either anonymous in their
constructs or poorly enunciated, because while the tone of their performances is
easily recognizable, the actual progressions do little to leave a lasting impression
on you. In a way, they had become a mechanical manifestation of a tired methodology
by 2000 and in the absence of magnificent performances of significant depth, the solo
variants of these melodic ideas had lost whatever unique qualities they had conveyed
in previous efforts by the composer. One of the work's ironies is that its two best
cues, "Vianne Sets Up Shop" and "Party Preparations," offer the score's only truly
engaging personality with an ethnic flair that doesn't even seem appropriate for the
setting. The spirited acoustic guitar, accordion, and woodwind performances in these
two cues give it a Mediterranean sound that is distinctly Latin, bypassing the usual
cliches of French accents in film music and instead pointing it towards the Italian
or Spanish cultures. Some of this material is faintly reminiscent of the Tuscany
portions of Portman's
Only You. No matter their questionable ethnicity, these
two cues are so obviously the highlights of
Chocolat that you're left badly
wanting at least hints of this spirit in the remaining cues. Some of Portman's normal
style of chipper, prancing chase and comedy music in a minor key (led by "Vianne
Confronts The Comte") attempts to stir up the same sentiment for the rebellious
parts of the story, but their tempo and depth is lacking in their incarnations here (and
the normally wild piano and other percussion heard in these kinds of outbursts are
absent as well). Unfortunately, the remainder of Portman's music for the film is
surprisingly mundane, predictable at every turn but offering the composer's
stereotypical ideas in ways so subdued that it is difficult to warm up to this
score.
Despite making the right basic moves to suffice for
Chocolat,
the most devastating aspect of this score is that fails to generate the sense of
genuine charm and heart heard in most of Portman's other scores (even the just
previous
The Closer You Get). In the score's final two cues, Portman nearly
takes the score to the next level of dramatic appeal, almost engaging the layers of
strings in the syrupy statements of broad theme that had defined the best moments of
her career at the time. Instead, these cues both tail off into a continuation of the
slow, dry sequences of elongated string and solo woodwind performances that hadn't
amounted to anything previously in the work. Overall,
Chocolat is adequate,
but the film's attempts to artificially insert serious scenes of contemplative drama
in its second half translate into cues like "Fire" and "Mayan Bowl Breaks" that
have absolutely nothing to solicit repeat listens. The themes are there and Portman is
loyal to them, but without any prominent enunciations of these ideas (and their
anonymous forms by nature), the score quickly becomes a bore. In general, there had
been many comparisons between Portman's staggered minor/major key rhythms and the
style utilized by Danny Elfman in his gothic
Black Beauty. Others placed this
style as an offshoot of both Elfman and Patrick Doyle's work for similar productions.
It's not hard to imagine why Portman and Doyle fans are often one and the same. But
at times, as in
Chocolat, Portman adapts a slightly more Southern European
sound, and this light touch makes her music a closer relative to the established
styles of composers like Nicola Piovani and Luis Bacalov. For those who appreciated
their Oscar-recognized scores for
Life is Beautiful and
Il Postino
(respectively), then
Chocolat would perhaps serve as a good starting point in
an investigation of Portman's career. For established Portman collectors, though, you
might be disappointed by the score's lack of teeth. The album presentation includes
two source pieces at the start and finish that frankly engage the listener in ways
that Portman's work does not. Even at only 35 minutes of length, the score material
on this album will likely test the patience of almost any listener, and the Oscar and
Globe nominations for
Chocolat's music were definitely not deserved.
*** @Amazon.com: CD or
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| Bias Check: |
For Rachel Portman reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.31
(in 30 reviews)
and the average viewer rating is 3.26
(in 28,116 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.
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The insert includes no extra information about the score or film.
