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Review of Cold Mountain (Gabriel Yared)
FILMTRACKS RECOMMENDS:
Buy it... if you can appreciate restrained, solemn performances of
traditional bluegrass tunes and a characteristically conservative,
introspective string and piano underscore from Gabriel Yared.
Avoid it... if you are expecting either fast paced, enthusiastic bluegrass performances or an impassioned, robust orchestral score for the Civil War setting, the overall soundtrack disjointed and dissatisfying.
FILMTRACKS EDITORIAL REVIEW:
Cold Mountain: (Gabriel Yared) Considered a
front-runner for a slew of awards in the late 2003 season of studio
jockeying, Cold Mountain opened to a harsh split of positive and
negative reviews, with critics often praising certain aspects of the
film as genuine while also slamming entire sequences of it for being
contrived and overly-melodramatic. Directed by Academy Award-winner
Anthony Minghella and based on Charles Frazier's best-selling Civil War
novel of the same name, the film tells the story of a wounded
confederate soldier (Jude Law) who deserts his unit and makes a perilous
journey through North Carolina to be with his pre-war love, Ada (Nicole
Kidman). Meanwhile, Ada attempts to survive on her own while reviving
her father's farm with the help of a more spirited female survivor, Ruby
(Renee Zellweger). The film alternates between treatments of romance,
large landscapes, chase sequences, and the horrors of war, and it is
generally the inconsistent treatment of these scenes compared to each
other that seems to have drawn negative criticism about the project. It
was supported by an unusually high budget for a Miramax film, and the
soundtrack was hoped to be among the more successful aspects of the
entire production. The genre of music that was chosen for the era and
location of the film was a historical variation on bluegrass, as to be
expected, and Miramax was quick to recognize the potential of that genre
in soundtracks after the monumentally huge success of the music from
O Brother, Where Art Thou?. Thus, they hired producer T-Bone
Burnett, a Grammy-winner for organizing that project, to duplicate the
success for Cold Mountain. Miramax, with their sniffers pointed
in the direction of a best song Oscar nomination or win, even went so
far as to hire Elvis Costello and Sting to each write a song for the
soundtrack, and despite early indications that they would sing for the
occasion, these performances never materialized on album. In the end, a
humbler collection of somber bluegrass tunes was combined with an
equally somber score by composer Gabriel Yared for the overall package.
As you could expect, however, the restrained approach for Cold
Mountain makes it a 180 degree turn from the faster-paced enthusiasm
of O Brother, Where Art Thou?. The soundtrack alternates between
traditional bluegrass pieces and modern bluegrass adaptations of those
ideas, all performed by the same contemporary voices.
In some of the song performances for Cold Mountain, an argument could be made that the style of the vocals is too polished in a contemporary sense to really bring out the historically accurate qualities of the traditional tunes, and bluegrass collectors should be aware of this flaw before diving into the primary soundtrack album without hearing its application in the film. Returning for T-Bone Burnett is the voice of Alison Krauss, but this time her performances are so tentative that they lose their appeal. Likewise, the songs performed by Jack White are lackluster in energy and genuine bluegrass spirit. Only in the latter half of the album does a more heartening sound take effect; Cassie Franklin finally puts some defiance into the female vocals, and the two tracks by the Sacred Harp Singers, recorded with fantastic authenticity in an old, wooden-framed church, are easily the highlight of the soundtrack. All of the bluegrass music will likely seem like a foreign world to film score collectors interested in Gabriel Yared's work for the movie. Aside from one crossover, source-like cue, there can't be any greater difference between the fiddle, banjo, and mandolin performances by the ensembles for the songs and the orchestral composition for the score. This difference alone causes the soundtrack serious trouble, because bluegrass listeners will be bored to death by Yared's typical, meandering piano and string writing. Even for score collectors, the initial album wasn't worth the price for the fifteen minutes of score material, because in these four tracks is yawn-inducing music that owners of Yared's albums have heard again and again in more elegant incarnations. Having collaborated with the same director for The English Patient and The Talented Mr. Ripley, winning the Oscar for the former, Yared may have inspired some listeners to expect an exploration beyond a simple repetition of his sullen, uninteresting string writing for Sylvia that the composer had deployed just a few months earlier. The main "Cold Mountain" theme, performed in extended sequences by piano and strings, drags on and on at a disengaged pace, taking forever to complete its own statements and giving the whole chamber score a wishy-washy effect on the listener. The identity for Ada suffers from the same sparse disconnect; in the picture, the character's performance of this idea is supposed to have a significant, alluring impact upon the soldier, and yet its progressions and conveyance are so inexplicably passionless that it's impossible to believe that element of the plot. The Ada theme is, more than the Cold Mountain one, the loose backbone of the score, Yared returning to it at the end of the work for resolution. Other ideas in Cold Mountain exist beyond the main and Ada themes, but they are often just as fleeting. The composer decided to write all-new melodies for specific scenes rather than rely upon the further adaptation or development of existing ones, leading to multiple variants of love themes that accompany both the soldier and the leading duo. Vague motifs for the horrors of war also stew in the moments of slightly greater volume, but don't expect any of these passages to be convincingly compelling. Generally, there is nothing in this work to adequately indicate that there are chases, battles, or even anything historical about the narrative, Yared mostly ignoring the bluegrass element despite doing a fair amount of research into it ahead of time. He failed to incorporate anything outside of his core comfort zone to address the genre of the film or the bluegrass songs, and he was thus a predictably curious choice to compose music for this film despite his collaboration with the director. Overall, everything in this introspective work seems disconnected and out of place, and for the package to have worked to any listenable degree on album, the songs and score needed to be separated onto two distinct albums. Yared did release a promotional CD of his score that helped him earn Golden Globe and Academy Award nominations for his work, but this recognition likely came via reputation only, and even score collectors may not be impressed by Yared's arrangement. In 2021, Music Box Records released a limited and rare 2-CD set for Cold Mountain that contains the score as heard in the film on one CD and the original promo presentation and several alternate takes on the second one. The film version remains a disappointment on this product, exposing more clearly the reality that Yared offered so little emotional depth to the picture. The promotional and alternate takes are an improvement, however, and these largely contain earlier variations of his most romantic material that was later boiled down to lesser incarnations for use in the picture. The promotional sequence adds greater heft to the score's themes in a more accessibly whimsical Yared manner, making it the far better listening experience. A few of the alternate takes later on that second CD also represent strong ideas that were, for whatever reason, diminished in the final product. In the end, the 2021 set is an improvement over the 2003 product for those who adore Yared's cerebral, romantic meanderings, but the score still suffers from poor narrative flow and abysmal technique for the battle and suspense cues. The music still seems like an artistic misfire decades later. For both Yared and Burnett, Cold Mountain served as a lesson that you cannot automatically recapture the same magic a second time.
TRACK LISTINGS:
2003 Sony Album:
Total Time: 63:07
* score track by Gabriel Yared 2021 Music Box Album: Total Time: 127:43
* performed by Gabriel Yared
NOTES & QUOTES:
The insert of the 2003 Sony album includes extensive credits but
no information about the score or film. That of the 2021 Music Box album
contains extensive information about both.
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The reviews and other textual content contained on the filmtracks.com site may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the prior written authority of Christian Clemmensen at Filmtracks Publications. All artwork and sound clips from Cold Mountain are Copyright © 2003, 2021, Sony/Columbia, Music Box Records and cannot be redistributed without the label's expressed written consent. Page created 12/19/03 and last updated 5/24/21. |
