 |
| Howard |
Flatliners/Falling Down: (James Newton Howard)
Among the edgy films directed by Joel Schumacher in the early 1990's
were
Flatliners and
Falling Down, both scored by his
regular collaborator at the time, James Newton Howard. Selections from
the two soundtracks were long available only on one combination album
released in 1997, a pseudo-bootleg CD release that became a high
collectible. In 2014,
Falling Down received an official release
by Intrada Records, and until equal treatment of
Flatliners
arises, this review will remain merged as before due to the 1997
product. The mass appeal for that rare album surrounded the release of
the highly varied and occasionally beautiful score for
Flatliners, a youthful favorite with an all-star production crew
and cast that depicted a group of medical students who decided they
would challenge the power of God by suspending themselves in near-death
experiences to see what happens at the doors of the other side.
Supposedly, the experience is reported to one of peaceful bliss, but
these cocky students manage to turn the affair into a series of gloomy
and suspenseful maneuvers in resuscitation, all set in a Gothic and
shadowy environment that causes the film to walk a fine line between
adventure and horror. Howard plays the score along the lines of a
religious horror film, alternating between glorious choral statements of
beauty and terrifying barrages of orchestral and electronic mayhem. The
moments of beauty culminate in the remarkable "Redemption" cue, a
documented highlight in Howard's entire career and a calling card among
his early assignments. This four-plus minute cue is harmonious in a
grandiose religious fashion, offering the film's salvation in a magical
thematic statement arguably unparalleled in the composer's lengthy
career since. On the other hand, the score's whole is better defined by
its considerably disturbing horror elements, with cues like "Flying -
First Expedition" featuring a downright unpleasant combination of atonal
choral chanting and heavy percussion that mirrors Danny Elfman's
concurrent
Nightbreed score in many ways. Howard does return to
the simple beauty of "Redemption" in a few places, but in the same
fashion as in
A Devil's Advocate, with single notes of
magnificent harmony bursting out of otherwise distraught action. In
"Diary of a Surgeon," Howard creates a sound remarkably similar to what
Trevor Jones would write for
Hideaway a few years later, with a
electric guitar rhythm propelling an adult chorus, though here in
Flatliners, the guitars eventually wail harshly (among other
irritating sound effects). Poor sound quality (with a distracting level
of hiss) plagues the score's entire presentation on the 1997
album.
Two years later, Schumacher's
Falling Down
offered another gloomy picture but in a completely different setting.
Under the pressure of the stresses of modern day life in Los Angeles, an
average business man does for traffic jam motorists what the movie
Network did for broadcast news viewers. The no-name man, played
by Michael Douglas, snaps mentally, going on a careless rampage across
the metropolitan area, during which he just happens to acquire a large
bag of weapons and wanders through dangerous circumstances with
remarkably good fortune. His path towards self-destruction neither
heroic or villainous, with the doomed, soulsick man trashing symbols of
modern life, wasting both a telephone booth and a fast food restaurant
with automatic weapons, as well as destroying a construction site with a
rocket launcher. For this project, Howard takes a far more subtle role
than in
Flatliners. He would be nominated for an Oscar for this
kind of gritty, somewhat underplayed action music in the later
The
Fugitive, and like that better known score,
Falling Down
suffers from a certain anonymity that works well in the picture but not
on album. One of the more creative tracks is "MacArthur Park," with a
noir trumpet solo, a weary music box, and the distant, hip rhythms of a
city's center in the background. Even when Howard allows the rage of the
man to inspire his music, as in "Miracle Mile," the score is confined to
almost jungle-like rhythms, often with tingling electronic
accompaniment. No strong theme or motif exists in
Falling Down,
with one of the most unique identifiers of the score being a wavering
electric guitar-like low brass slur between notes as the man's mental
breakdown continues. The only true theme of the score represents the
familial relations in the story, one performed by synthetic choir
throughout the score but humanized by strings at the final
confrontation. Everything in the work emphasizes the man's previous
sanity slipping away, until a noir-like trumpet at the end lends a
strangely optimistic cop-thriller tone to the whole affair. Overall, the
Falling Down score is a mainly ambient experience lacking the
vengeful grit of the film, and it struggles to maintain interest alone.
On the 1997 album, its sound quality, however, is much better than that
of
Flatliners, and that clarity carries over to the nicely
presented but not particularly sustainable 2014 Intrada product for the
later score (that album does illuminate the difficulty Howard had
narrowing down the right tone for the final scenes, and the alternate
takes are included). Considering these two scores together, the
highlight is clearly the "Redemption" cue from
Flatliners, and
only Howard completists will enjoy both scores from start to finish.
@Amazon.com: CD or
Download
- Flatliners: ***
- Falling Down: **
- Music as Heard on the 1997 Combo Album: ***
- Music as Heard on the 2014 Falling Down Album: **
| Bias Check: |
For James Newton Howard reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.4
(in 70 reviews)
and the average viewer rating is 3.36
(in 86,418 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.
|
The insert of the 1997 bootleg includes no extra information about the score or film. That of
the 2014 Intrada album contains extensive notation about both.
