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| Newman |
Up Close & Personal: (Thomas Newman) Hollywood
screws up good scripts all the time, often taking a compelling real
story and sweetening it with romantic fluff to help sell tickets to
female audiences eager to see major stars flash their chemistry on
screen. Such was the case with the Robert Redford and Michelle Pfeiffer
love-fest
Up Close & Personal, but the difference between this
1996 film and other equivalent butcherings of a non-fiction concept is
that critics blasted its studio mercilessly for its streamlined
disrespect for the person who inspired its plot. That woman was Jessica
Savitch, a controversial television anchorwoman of the 1970's and early
1980's whose rise to fame was just as sensationalized as the
circumstances of her accidental death in 1983. After adapting the Alanna
Nash biography of Savitch in the late 1980's, the screenwriters for
Up Close & Personal suffered a total of eight years of studio
meddling with the script that caused the writers so much trauma that
they wrote their own book about the awful experience. By the time
Disney's Touchstone Pictures was finished with
Up Close &
Personal, the movie existed only to serve as a mindless romance
story for Redford and Pfeiffer, which didn't make much sense given that
the altered story contained a depressing ending involving the death of a
lead character that was completely unrelated to the real life events
that inspired the film. None of these problems stopped female viewers
from turning the project into one of mild success for Disney, and its
legacy is largely associated most frequently with the popular love
ballad "Because You Loved Me" written for the film's romantic bonding
sequences. The innocuous Diane Warren song, performed smoothly by Celine
Dion, was popular enough to earn the only major awards nominations
(Academy, Grammy, and Golden Globe) enjoyed by this picture. Relegated
to a secondary role was Thomas Newman's score for
Up Close &
Personal, his third of four collaborations with director Jon Avent
in the 1990's. Newman was finally beginning to fill the shoes of his
father in the industry early in that decade, a frequent Oscar nominee
and an artist whose distinct instrumental and rhythmic style earned him
an immediate fanbase within the film music community. Unfortunately, the
palatability of Newman's music for those Avent movies declined as the
1990's progressed, never again achieving the affable personality of
Fried Green Tomatoes.
Newman's contribution to
Up Close & Personal
plays like patchwork compilation of the composer's developing skills in
various genres, never completely leaving his comfort zone but traversing
an extremely wide range of styles without excelling at any of them for
very long. The overall spirit of his approach is surprisingly sparse and
cold, his romantic material barely registering with any convincing sense
of warmth. The many scenes of conversation are handled by Newman with
very restrained atmospheres of mostly tonal but insignificant
structures. Don't expect to hear obvious themes in
Up Close &
Personal, though when he does allow them to flourish, the score is
at its best. Strings and piano carry these duties in these highlights,
"Up Close" introducing the main theme on string layers and occasional
oboe for the opening scenes. The demeanor of this identity is
reminiscent of James Horner's quieter drama and Rachel Portman's chord
progressions of the era. Developed further in "Upwind," this theme
receives its most emotional climax in "She Knows Now," concluding the
album release with two lovely minutes of sorrowful harmony that will
justify the entire product for some Newman collectors. The purely
background cues in
Up Close & Personal do flirt with this theme
on occasion, but they tend to reside so faintly in the soundscape that
you do not notice them. The other elements at play in the score are the
detractions, the Miami location treated to mambo tones that Newman
tepidly explores in "Miss Sierra Logger" (the Latin flair is much better
represented by the source usage of Tito Puente's "Hong Kong Mambo").
Because the two leads find themselves in tense situations as part of
their reporting duties, Newman's score veers off into suspense territory
with poor results. The ethnic woodwind accents to the percussive
rumblings of "Uprise" are unconvincing, and similarly vague ethnicity
dilutes the effectiveness of "Los Locos." The most forceful cue is
"Cellblock C," which takes the previous suspense motif's percussive base
and layers odd sound effects and tapped cymbals on top for an unnerving
couple of minutes. After a stinger in "Bonefish," this material is
reprised in echoes. One of the main issues that a listener will have
with
Up Close & Personal is its poor album presentation; without
the cues in chronological order, what little narrative flow Newman was
able to create is totally lost. Also an obvious problem with the product
is the absence of the Dion song, which addresses the romance of the
story infinitely better than the score does. This effort ultimately
qualifies as one of Newman's weakest of the 1990's, despite what little
redemption comes in the album's final track.
** @Amazon.com: CD or
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| Bias Check: |
For Thomas Newman reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.14
(in 37 reviews)
and the average viewer rating is 3.18
(in 60,753 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.
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The insert includes no extra information about the score or film.
