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Review of Da 5 Bloods (Terence Blanchard)
FILMTRACKS RECOMMENDS:
Buy it... if you can appreciate Terence Blanchard's steady,
admirable expression of character drama in the war genre, especially as
it emulates techniques from top composers to occasionally impressive
results.
Avoid it... if you cannot overcome a highly inappropriate ethnic element in this context or if Blanchard's tendency to repeat thematic phrasing extensively without enough performance variation will leave you bored by the score's redundant length.
FILMTRACKS EDITORIAL REVIEW:
Da 5 Bloods: (Terence Blanchard) Coincidentally
timed perfectly to coincide with America's societal unrest in June of
2020, Spike Lee's dramatic Da 5 Bloods explores the Black Lives
Matter movement in a most unexpected place: Vietnam. Four surviving
members of a black US Army squad from the Vietnam War return to that
country in contemporary times to locate the body of their slain team
leader and a collection of gold bars they buried in the forest after
taking them from a downed CIA plane. Their enemies are everywhere, from
the demons that haunt their past to the mercenaries of modern times who
betray them, life's hardships catching up with them as they eventually
struggle to remain united in their mission. Some "grumpy old men" humor
is thrown into the equation along the way, and while reconciliation and
peace do come at the end of the film, don't expect Da 5 Bloods to
be among the most pleasant cinematic journeys. The grimly sad emotional
arc of the story is not unexpected for a Lee film, of course, and the
director turned once again to longtime collaborator Terence Blanchard to
provide a robust orchestral score that intermingles with six songs from
Marvin Gaye's 1971 album, "What's Going On." Blanchard, while known
widely as a jazz musician with a trumpet at hand, has sprinkled a
variety of solid, traditional film scores throughout his career, and for
many genre collectors, Da 5 Bloods will present itself as a
culminating highlight of that line of work. He has touched upon the war
genre several times in the past, notably with historical entries in
The Miracle at St. Anna and Red Tails, and one can easily
tell that Lee's direction for the music in Da 5 Bloods largely
emulates what Oliver Stone would have done if he had remained to shoot
the script as originally intended. The interaction between the Gaye
songs and Blanchard's score is non-existent, the film content to let the
two halves of the soundtrack sometimes intersect in sudden shifts. On
Blanchard's part, a veteran film music collector can hear a number of
influences at work, and the composer's own jazzy inclinations are only
barely evident in that mix. For many of these listeners, Da 5
Bloods will present itself as having the biggest scope of a
Blanchard score to date.
Rather than generate a multi-genre hybrid score for Da 5 Bloods, Blanchard instead leans heavily upon established ideas of war and Americana. This should come as no surprise given that Lee incorporated Richard Wagner's "Flight of the Valkyries" into the mix as well, no doubt as a tribute to Apocalypse Now. The more pastoral applications evoke Aaron Copland via Jerry Goldsmith while the emotional weight is clearly inspired by John Williams and the technique of applying broken chords to denote trauma emulates Carter Burwell. The 90-piece orchestra is in full force for the opening powerhouse cue, "What This Mission's About," that Blanchard admitted was an extreme challenge due to the gravity of the scene. "That opening one. That was it, dude," he later commented. "Man, talk about having like an 'oh, shit' moment. You know? It's like, when I got it, and I watched it, I went, 'Oh, my God.'" It is here that Blanchard best combines the stoic and respectful heroism of Williams on lower brass, strings, and snare while applying the challenging chords common to Burwell. The theme and its secondary phrases expressed here carry over extensively in the remainder of the score, adapted to a variety of less forceful applications as the lead characters struggle through both their mission and the impacts of systemic racism that haunt them half a world from home. Between "We Bury It (For Now)" and "Bloods Go Into Jungle" on the album release, the main theme for the team is nearly omnipresent, Blanchard sometimes adapting the idea to an interesting new emotional level, as in "MLK Assassinated," though most of the recapitulations are softer variants of the same static structures and instrumentation of the opening cue. Arguably a highlight of the score is "Finding the Gold," the only truly upbeat and triumphant cue in the entire work, the optimism inherent in Williams' warmer writing, especially with supporting woodwinds, shining through as a moment of relief. (Note that the score otherwise does little to address the occasional humor of the story, the film content to leave these scenes without music.) The tonality on brass late in "Finding the Gold" is the score's closest connection to Goldsmith's sense of nobility while the concluding chords return to Williams bravado. One of the better-varied renditions of the main theme comes in the tortured "Paul and Norman," a particularly harrowing scene of self-reckoning that required Blanchard to offer a greater emphasis of stress to the emotional range of the idea. Meanwhile, the second major theme in Da 5 Bloods exists for the interpersonal drama and location of the tale. It's a lovely theme in and of itself, though its rendering on a duduk complicates matters. As a representation of Vietnam, the Middle Eastern instrument is rather distracting and insulting, one of those occasions when something "foreign sounding" doesn't suffice. As Blanchard explains, "For the Viet Cong, I decided to incorporate a duduk, and for the Americans I used full-sounding snares, percussion, and brass." Half of that sentence makes sense. When pressed in one interview about addressing Vietnam in the music, he continued, "I tried to pick up on the little things, as that music has a certain type of melodic and harmonic structure to it that's a bit more pentatonic. I'm pretty sensitive and careful, as I never want it to sound like I'm trying to appropriate something from a specific culture. I want it to sound like I'm paying homage. That's why we brought in a really great duduk player." Again, that explanation doesn't fly once the duduk is mentioned, so listeners are left to appreciate the beauty of the instrument rather than apply their brains to its use. The duo of "Otis and Tien Have Dinner" and "Tien and Daughter Talk" initially suggest that the theme may represent the redemptive Otis storyline (a character discovers he fathered a daughter with a Vietnamese woman from the war), but it extends to "David Meets Hedy," "Paul and David Have a Fallout," and other cues that reveal the idea to be one of personal healing as well. Blanchard sometimes mingles the two themes adeptly, as in "Rice Paddies," in which he passes the ideas across each other's base instrumentation, but in their most prominent applications, they are kept apart. The lengthy "End Credits" cue supplies them in convenient suite form. Overall, Da 5 Bloods is a score that must have looked fabulous on paper but presents issues as recorded. The duduk is badly inappropriate here, and the inevitable connections to other composers may also distract. Perhaps more importantly, Blanchard has difficulty adjusting the performance emphasis of his themes to compensate for their extremely repetitive phrasing. This failure to expressively emote beyond a limited range of steady respectfulness yields a surprisingly redundant score given the film's length. Perhaps some of this weakness comes from a rather uninspired performance from the full ensemble. While the impressive opening and closing cues will earn all the press, look to "Finding the Gold" for the score's most appealing release from its otherwise overwrought stature. It's a highly respectful, appreciable take on war-genre character drama, but one not without flaw. ****
TRACK LISTINGS:
Total Time: 61:46
NOTES & QUOTES:
There exists no official packaging for this album.
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