: (James Horner) So long as Hollywood
continues to glaze over the facts in the actual history of Pocahontas
and John Smith, movies like
will baffle and
frustrate historians. Director Terrence Malick's fourth feature film
since debuting in the early 1970's takes a position a little closer to
reality than the Disney animated feature ten years prior, but still
misses many of the basics. For instance, the real Pocahontas was only
nine years old when the Englishmen arrived, and Smith was a far older,
more rotund man than actor Colin Ferrell. In the interest of politically
correct marketability, Malick shrugs off many of those inconsistencies
and decides to approach the film exactly as you expect him to: from the
perspective of nature. Malick's most recent two films have shown
humanity as an element of nature rather than vice versa, and
is no different. For its two hours, nature is its leading
star, and the colonists and natives are explored as awestruck, curious
peoples at the mercy of the environment. For his film
, Malick utilized the broad strokes of Hans Zimmer's capable
score, and although Zimmer was expected to rejoin Malick for
, blockbuster score veteran James Horner would embark on the
challenging and ultimately frustrating journey. Representing Horner's
fourth score in the latter half of 2005,
would end
up a disaster of an ever-changing post-production edit of the film, with
the overall length cut from 150 minutes to 130 minutes --reportedly
without sacrificing much actual content-- and a significant amount of
Horner's original work removed from the picture. Portions of Horner's
work were thus replaced by Wagner's "Das Rheingold" and Mozart's "Piano
Concerto No.23" in the final product, and all indications point to
Malick as the source of discontent.
Horner even uses his notation in the album release to
thank the New Line Cinema executive in charge of music for siding with
him in the post-production battle, referring to the assignment as an
"incomprehensible incoming madness" and laments the "chaos that comes
from a perpetually changing film." From all the circumstances put
together, Malick seems to have come closer than anyone recently to
actually rejecting a Horner score outright from a project. As Horner
also states, he stands by his instincts in defending his approach to
writing the music for
The New World. His resulting effort is a
merging of his sweeping themes of his famous epics and the subdued
atmospheric magic of his lesser-known gems. On the surface, he seems to
have produced the kind of work that would fit Malick's vision of nature
perfectly, creating a slightly cautious work saturated with curiosity
and fantasy, with a finished recording mixed to a wet wash of tingling,
echoing sounds true to such wonderments. To achieve this quiet
exploratory enthusiasm, Horner pulls many of the elements from forest
scenes in
The Spitfire Grill, including the essential piano and
string base, and overlays the synthetic choir from
Titanic, a
dancing triangle, and distant melodic lines from high woodwinds that are
meant to accentuate the plentiful samples of chirping birds that also
occupy the sonic landscape. While this technique will remind film music
collectors of Alan Silvestri's
FernGully from the early 1990's,
Horner follows these sections of score with the slowly-building momentum
of the full ensemble, often leading to respectfully restrained
performances of the score's title theme by the string section. Both "The
New World" and "Of the Forest" feature this magical atmosphere, though
the former cue takes almost four minutes to finally state its title
theme without the constant trickling piano movements and chirping
birds.
These forest cues are easily the highlights of
The
New World, joined by "A Dark Cloud is Forever Lifted" at the end, in
which the cloud is literally lifted at the five-minute mark. Horner's
harmonious lines of distant woodwinds and strings are joined by the
ever-elegant rolling piano of
Beautiful Mind, though without the
outwardly typical chord shifts of that and previous scores. Where
Horner's score does stumble slightly is in the development of the
secondary theme for Pocahontas, arguably a love theme involving both
Smith and Rolfe. Often led by solo piano, the strings and woodwinds in
these sections never emerge from the misty environment of the
nature-dominated cues, offering a low level of sincerity in their
performances. A constant haze exists over nearly every cue in
The New
World, and while this works wonders for the larger canvas, the
intricate personal relationships lack any of the wit and genuine
intrigue of the characters. One cue that does benefit strongly from the
haze that blows through this score like an elusive ship in the fog is
the "Winter/Battle" cue, for which the first part of the cue is set over
the harsh, but enticing texture of Horner's electronics and bass string
domination heard in parts of
Beyond Borders and relating to an
approach dating all the way back to
The Name of the Rose. The
latter half of that cue represents the only action cue on the album,
still placing the dramatic drum, percussion, and string hits behind the
veil of the overall fog of the score.
Overall, there are twenty minutes of Horner's melodic
and pleasant textures for the almost mystical forest environment that
beg for a rearrangement into one fantastic suite. This collection of
cues is led, interestingly, by the song adaptation of Horner's title
theme at the end of the album. Easily the best song of 2005 in any film,
Horner tones down the overbearing romanticism of
Titanic and
replaces Celine Dion with 17-year-old opera phenom Hayley Westenra,
whose elegant performance over the same orchestral and synthetic
textures from Horner's underscore are simply exquisite. Detractors of
Horner's works will find fault with
The New World, however. The
theme itself moves with related rhythms and chord progressions as the
secondary theme for
The Land Before Time (the one also translated
into song), and the perhaps the greatest irony of all of Horner's work
here is that there exist structural similarities between "Listen to the
Wind" and Alan Menken's "Colors of the Wind" from
Pocahontas
(aside, of course, from the names of the songs). Also along the way,
listeners will note that Horner doesn't entirely attempt to diverge from
his established comfort zone when it comes to the chord progressions and
rhythms that define much of his work. One thing must be said on Horner's
behalf: despite the stylistic consistencies throughout most of his
scores, his four efforts of 2005 have all yielded significantly
different results from that same palette. Although 2005 will be a year
remembered for John Williams' achievements, Horner's contributions in
the year are as varied as ever, and the partially-rejected
The New
World is a strong and surprisingly refreshing entry in the mix. The
album squeezes on 80 minutes of Horner's work for listeners to enjoy in
the form that the composer had originally intended the music to be heard
in the film before Malick's haphazard edits.
Be aware that the album
does not contain any of the Wagner or Mozart music heard frequently in
the film!
**** @Amazon.com: CD or
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Bias Check: |
For James Horner reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.15
(in 108 reviews) and the average viewer rating is 3.23
(in 200,365 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.
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