Filmtracks Traffic Rank: #914
Written 4/23/04, Revised 10/5/11
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Buy it... if you consistently enjoy Rachel Portman's base
orchestral style and wish to hear it expressed with a distinct Chinese
flavor not heard in the other scores of her early era.
Avoid it... if the static, monothematic style of Portman's dramatic
work is too similar in any instrumentation or performance for you to
distinguish its better variants as noteworthy.
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| Portman |
The Joy Luck Club: (Rachel Portman) Vaulting to
great heights immediately after its release, Amy Tan's best-selling 1989
novel was destined for similar success upon its adaptation to the
arthouse film industry. With extraordinary care given to the
authenticity of the Chinese culture depicted, The Joy Luck Club
is, on the surface, a heart-warming tale of a group of Chinese-American
women in San Francisco who congregate once a week and play mah jong.
These gatherings, though, are an opportunity for their children and
grandchildren, as well as the audience, to hear fascinating stories
about the histories of their families. In flashbacks, their lifestyles
in China come alive and awaken the audience to the intricate social
structures of the nation and how those lifestyles have evolved in
America. It is a film of substantial heart that is saturated with the
expected women's issues, and thus, it wasn't surprising to see director
Wayne Wang bring British composer Rachel Portman into this delicate
process. At the time of the film's release in 1993, Portman was not yet
recognized internationally as a foremost female composer, with only a
substantial amount of British television scoring and a handful of
independent films representing her known credits. When you look back at
her involvement in a project as beautifully rendered and well-mannered
as The Joy Luck Club, though, the fit seems absolutely perfect.
When the film was released to critical success, Portman went through an
immediate phase of being discovered by Hollywood, a process that would
be affirmed the following year with the arrival of her most quoted work
of the decade, Only You. It has been speculated that only her
relative anonymity in 1993 (along with a strong field of competition)
kept her from receiving her first Academy Award nomination that year.
Nevertheless, listeners noticed and identified with her fluid, sensitive
style for The Joy Luck Club, a score that would establish her
very consistent, monothematic tendencies while also utilizing authentic
Chinese instruments in such a way that Portman fans would not hear
joined with her style for nearly two decades. Her 2011 follow-up for the
less acclaimed Snow Flower and the Secret Fan is a sentimental
reminder of The Joy Luck Club in many ways, but it lacks the same
consistently tender embrace.
In the sense that Portman's music for lovable character
stories all begins to sound alike after the third cue of each score,
The Joy Luck Club is really no different. As film music
enthusiasts, you either fall in love with it or you don't. The tone of
The Joy Luck Club is accessibly pleasant, the emotions are
subtle, and the composer's themes have a lasting touch of bittersweet
sadness. This score marked the initiation of the deep, orchestral
romantic style (not in a lurid, Hollywood sort of way, but rather in a
culturally sensitive and familial fashion) heard especially in the
structurally simple themes for layered strings with which Portman would
grace her subsequent scores. Outside of the primary title passages, the
latter half of "June Meets Her Twin Sisters" contains a substantial
preview of this technique. While the overall style and primary theme is
consistent with her later scores, there are a few differences between
The Joy Luck Club and Portman's other works that, for some
listeners, makes this score a superior listen. First, the use of an erhu
and other traditional Chinese instruments is a departure for the
composer, whose orchestral ensembles are typically unvaried. The erhu in
particular meshes well with Portman's thematic sensibilities, fitting in
as yet another variation of a string tone in her normal string-dominated
atmosphere. Also of note in
The Joy Luck Club is the solo
trumpet, something that Portman uses sparingly in her scores but is
often warmly embraced as another welcome variation from her norm (its
placement, for instance, in
The Legend of Bagger Vance is a
memorable enhancement). A solo flute provides additional flavor in
several cues. Unlike some of Portman's scores, there are no truly
outstanding cues in
The Joy Luck Club that stand out when
compared to other singular achievements in her career. The single theme
and several secondary motifs are nothing very refreshing to hear from
the composer in terms of unique progressions, but the consistency of the
slightly elevated orchestral presence, along with the solos, is what
distinguishes
The Joy Luck Club. Never spectacular, it is always
better than average, and the album exists as a perfectly rounded
presentation of 45 minutes of music that never becomes too repetitive to
enjoy. Many listeners hold this score dear to their hearts because it
was their first Portman experience, a sound very new at the time, and
when placed in context with the film, the music is still a tremendous
accomplishment to this day.
**** @Amazon.com: CD or
Download
Bias Check:
For Rachel Portman reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.31
(in 30 reviews) and the average viewer rating is 3.26
(in 28,140 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.
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