Filmtracks Traffic Rank: #1,776
Written 12/28/11
Invert Colors
Buy it... if you have a proven track record of success with the
sound design that Cliff Martinez provides for films, for his output for
Drive, aside from a few more pleasantly tonal passages, is
extremely typical to his limited range.
Avoid it... if you have difficulty forming emotional connections
with anonymously droning, ambient, electronic scores meant to
intentionally emphasize vague ethos and distorted realities.
 |
| Martinez |
Drive: (Cliff Martinez) One of the enduringly
curious aspects of downbeat thrillers with outrageous and violent
displays of depravity is how popular they can be if they are well
executed. It doesn't matter how brutal and senseless the killings shown
may be so long as they are glorified with unique appeal. The 2011
thriller Drive is one such example of a film with absolutely no
redeemable social mores and a depressing storyline that has enjoyed
immense critical and popular success because of exemplary
script-writing, casting, and cinematography. As a tribute to the
car-related crime movies of decades prior, Drive offers a
fascinating character study of an unnamed man (played by Ryan Gosling)
whose only true talent in life is driving cars and will do any task that
can take advantage of those skills. He's a stunt driver and auto
mechanic by day but a getaway driver for hire by night, living by strict
rules of communication and avoiding personal relationships. When he
becomes attached to his neighbor and her son, he immerses himself deeper
into a crime syndicate than he ever intended to be, all in an effort to
buy the protection of his neighbors. Depending on how you look upon the
distorted reality of this movie's criminal universe, perhaps you could
call his efforts a triumph, but there is little happiness implied at the
end of the tunnel for anyone involved. Style is key to the success of
Drive, and director Nicolas Winding Refn intentionally sought
music for the film that would reflect the ambivalent and ambiguous
nature of the primary character's motives. He had been a fan of Cliff
Martinez's score for Sex, Lies, and Videotape and hired the
composer to write what he deemed "retro 80's-ish, synthesizer Europop."
Martinez, after wowing listeners with his original "sound design scores"
for Traffic, Narc, and Solaris ten years prior, had
dropped off of the mainstream radar until 2011 represented a significant
comeback in his career. From his trio of Contagion, The
Lincoln Lawyer and Drive in that year, general movie-goers
and his collectors have rallied behind Drive as the pinnacle of
the three. A wide range of praise landed upon Martinez for his work for
this film, despite the fact that it is largely nothing different from
what he has written for several other pictures. The music does indeed
fulfill the director's wishes in supplying an intentionally vague,
ambient soundscape, but outside of achieving this simple task, it's more
likely that the accolades Martinez is receiving for Drive are a
result of the other qualities of the film rather than any particularly
transcendent aspect of his music.
To say that Martinez has been manipulating the same
music to apply to all of his assignments through the years would be
unfair to the composer, for he does have some variance in his methods,
but to casual ears, you'll be hard-pressed to hear anything radically
new from him in his selection of 2011 scores. The ingredients in
Drive include the usual synthesizer array, a cristal baschet
(essentially a glass harmonica, which is rendered useless in an
otherwise synthetic environment because it has no organic tone anyway),
electric guitar, saz, and sitar, all of which manipulated heavily to
subtract all the vibrant qualities of those instruments out of the
equation. There is no thematic development in the score, nor is there
rhythmic cohesion. Martinez does reprise his clicking loops from his
other works, though they are softer and less focused here. Only in
"Bride of Deluxe" does he really push them into the 80's "Europop" realm
that the director requested. Rather unusual for Martinez is his
application of tonal shifts to his keyboarding in this and "Hammer,"
among others, faintly echoing the drama inherent in Vangelis' mannerisms
of the target era. Addressing the understated love story, this
surprisingly pleasant material is a welcome reminder of
Solaris,
albeit brief. At the same time, outside of a few of the passages for the
disgusting hand-to-hand violence in the film, Martinez refuses to really
throw much outwardly challenging dissonance at the listener, making
Drive one of his more accessible works. That said, however, his
general methodology, despite all the acclaim this score has received, is
still acceptable in similar films simply because of a fad that exists in
contemporary times. Ambient music without synchronization points,
multiple lines of action, or melodic attribution is en vogue at this
moment, as evidenced most clearly by the nonsensical praise for the
scores of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. Because the process is
different (ambient music is recorded with intentionally vague boundaries
so a director can insert it where he or she arbitrarily wishes in a
picture) and relatively new, it's thought to be superior. This approach
does basically function in a heartless, directionless movie like
Drive, but it's still gaining attention because it's "different"
rather than "good" on its own merits. On album, the score is tedious and
repetitious in its droning anonymity. The director chose a collection of
songs for inclusion in the film, and other than a Brian Eno entry, they
are presented at the album's outset. Unfortunately, they are
stylistically all over the map and having little in common with the
score other than the feeling that someone has just bludgeoned you over
the head with a brick. Martinez fans will love this score, but older
collectors of movie scores will find little merit in its assumption that
sound design can make better emotional connections than traditional film
music.
** @Amazon.com: CD or
Download
