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| Goldenthal |
In Dreams: (Elliot Goldenthal) Performed by an impressive
cast, the story of
In Dreams is a chilling and desperate tale of a woman
who is haunted by dream-like premonitions of a child's death at the hands of an
abductor and serial killer, as well as the understandable hesitance of the police
to believe her. Director Neil Jordan violated a few of the fundamental rules of
effective thrillers, first relying too heavily on unoriginal concepts seen in
other films and then presenting the characters in the story in such a fashion
that few will actually care what happens to them. If Annette Bening's lead
character's attempted suicide had been successful, the film might actually have
been better. At any rate, the film is both unpleasant and surrealistic in its
photography, and the project was unexpectedly assigned to the equally abrasive
(on many occasions) Elliot Goldenthal. Representing the fourth collaboration
between Goldenthal and Jordan, for whom the composer had written
Interview
with the Vampire,
Michael Collins, and
The Butcher Boy,
In
Dreams won't surprise anyone. It does beg questions about the kind of music
that Goldenthal hears in his dreams. For listeners familiar with the
unconventional film music that Goldenthal writes when he is awake, the consensus
might be that
In Dreams could be the score to his own dreams. For most
other people, of course, this kind of music would only accompany nightmares, and
a perpetual, living nightmare is exactly the plotline of
In Dreams. As
those nightmares of Bening's character are realized, Goldenthal's score becomes
even more important is providing an excruciating sense of futility and realism.
Even if he hadn't been the regular artistic partner of the director,
In
Dreams is a project meant for the twisted imagination of Goldenthal in every
regard. Mainstream appreciation of Goldenthal's works, of course, had been
somewhat sparse even as of 1998, due to the composer's inaccessible style that
ignored the norms of both traditional classical and contemporary music in the
process of merging some of their traits. As an assignment,
In Dreams
begged Goldenthal for an even more inaccessible work, and he succeeded in taking
his dissonant, chaotic spirit to an all new level. Whereas many of Goldenthal's
scores are obnoxious in their droning, meandering, and aimless style of
obscurity,
In Dreams presents a score that may be just as obnoxious, but
in a completely different way.
Dissonant and chaotic this score is, but this time Goldenthal
has a definite start and finish to the journey, with plenty of intriguing moves
in the middle. The creativity of the composer's music for films like this is
balanced by a certain amount of frustration with the tumultuous result of that
creativity. In portions of
In Dreams, Goldenthal offers orchestral
magnificence in the horror genre that would make Bernard Herrmann or Christopher
Young proud, with tense string work highlighting often riveting cues. Unlike many
of Goldenthal's other thriller scores,
In Dreams also has significantly
identifiable crescendos, slams, and knee-wobbling resolutions. The brutal
"Rebecca's Abduction" cue is a remarkably powerful orchestral explosion among the
best of his career, drawing from
Interview with the Vampire and this time
finishing the creative thought. He also provides two cues of strikingly bleak,
but effective piano loneliness ("Claire's Nocturne" and "Andante"). On the other
hand, Goldenthal also rips with a certain dose of that unhindered creative chaos
that he likes to experiment with, especially when allowing for a new and abnormal
use of an instrument. In this case, as in
Golden Gate, the guinea pig is
the saxophone player, who is combined with a few electric guitars to create a
horrific new sonic representation of mental demise. Listening to cues such as
"Appellatron" will confirm exactly why Goldenthal isn't a mainstream artist, with
that cue (through "Rubber Room Stomp" a few cues later) thrusting a dissonant
eruption of seemingly jumbled blasts of the sax across the stereo mix. The name
of the guitars used for the project, "Deaf Elk," speaks for itself. The
interesting aspect of these deafening and nearly intolerable cues of horror is
that they are far more structurally complicated and fascinating in their
astonishingly bizarre constructs than Goldenthal's other efforts. They are still
inaccessible on album, of course, and that particular problem is accentuated by
the insertion of the two completely out of place songs in the middle of the
product. While "In Dreams" by Roy Orbison is a classic, its soft, romantic touch
completely destroys whatever mood the Goldenthal listener was attempting to
establish. Goldenthal's own, awkwardly choral song at the end is stricken by
stylistic indecision, and its stark performance offers little to compliment the
score other than a similarly mind-numbing personality. Overall,
In Dreams
is as difficult to digest as any Goldenthal thriller, but at least it is more
intriguing to study as a purely nightmarish endeavor than many of his other
works.
*** @Amazon.com: CD or
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| Bias Check: |
For Elliot Goldenthal reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.13
(in 16 reviews)
and the average viewer rating is 3.2
(in 17,800 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.
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The insert includes no extra information about the score or film.
