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| Ottman |
Orphan: (John Ottman) When Warner Brothers launched
its advertisement campaign for
Orphan early in the summer of
2009, little did they expect to receive such an overwhelmingly organized
response from a plethora of adoption advocacy groups in a national
grassroots campaign. Protests of the film came from more than fifty
organizations, aligning themselves around one Christian-based alliance
that set up a website specifically to denounce the picture. The problem
with their response was two-fold; first, of course, such protests only
serve to drive more attention to the film. Secondly, the much touted
twist at the end of the story has very little to with the controversy
involving adoption and everything to do with pedophilia. Without
question,
Orphan and its dirty little secret are truly sick,
reclassifying this film away from the standard horror/thriller variety
and giving it a distinctly perverted edge. In its advertised form,
Orphan tells of a gifted young girl adopted by a loving family
that, before too long, is suffering from her psychotic actions. The
background on this girl is much more complicated than anyone knows, and
despite the mother of the family realizing that something is very wrong
with the girl, nobody believes her. The pedophilic aspect of
Orphan easily the most disturbing aspect of the story, but
luckily composer John Ottman doesn't tackle this assignment with enough
deep thought to address (or foreshadow) that twist. Ottman had
collaborated with director Jaume Collet-Serra in his cinematic debut for
House of Wax, an awful horror flick of 2005 that also happened to
be Ottman's last foray into a genre that constituted most of his early
career. Over the course of the 2000's, Ottman has been steering away
from the kind of substandard horror and suspense assignments that
defined his early production, though
Orphan is a clear throwback
to the composer's previous methodology in the genre. As per formula, the
composer provides the film with a largely atmospheric score that blends
smaller orchestral tones with synthetic ambience, supplementing a
largely non-descript collection of creepy environmental material with a
lovely theme or two to highlight the work. Listeners comfortable with
Ottman's production of this variety will find
Orphan to be a
predictable but satisfying listening experience, undemanding in its
development but rewarding its harmonic moments.
The majority of the score meanders in a haze of
wetly-mixed synthetic elements and faint piano accents. The piano is
central to the story (and to the suburban lifestyle in general) and is
thus the basis for much of the thematic development in the score. Entire
cues can pass without more than just a few slight alterations of pitch,
whispering effects providing an uneasy backdrop for otherwise very
conservative soundscape. Slapping sounds echo distantly, occasional
string shrieks offer the horror, and a synthetic representation of
blowing wind wafts through at the forefront. The textures are pretty
standard in Ottman's career, and the purely suspense cues (which make up
about 80% of the work) will not impress a listener any more than
previous incarnations of the same general idea. The appeal in
Orphan exists in Ottman's usual thematic touch, a morbidly
melodramatic technique that prevails in most of his similar scores.
Interestingly, he provides themes for the female characters while
largely neglecting the male ones. The "Suite for Jessica and Max" and
"Silent Story/Max's Theme" cues provide absolutely lovely piano
performances with harmonic string accompaniment while high pitched
synthetic effects insert just enough dissonance to maintain a cloudy
atmosphere. These two cues are saturated with the kind of depressing but
solemnly gorgeous material that made the themes to
Gothika and
Hide and Seek such standouts compared to the remainder of their
respective scores. The only hint that Ottman gives of the little girl's
true origins comes in the co-written piece "Orphan," which opens the
score with resonating bass, deviant female vocalizations, and metallic
effects that contain a hint of the perversion in
Goodbye Lover.
This cue is especially a necessity in any Ottman suspense collection.
Like
Hide and Seek, in
Orphan there is some source-like
material to influence the album. As actress Isabelle Fuhrman performs
the 1964 song "Glory of Love" in the film, this short version and two
others (including the Jimmy Durante original) appear on the product. A
heavier version of the opening piece in "Orphan's Revenge" is drab
electronica that doesn't mesh with the remainder of the presentation.
Ultimately, it's easy to wish that Ottman would work more twisted
variations on his intriguing themes and deceptive harmonic passages
(false comforts of sorts) into these types of scores, but without much
intellectual thought in the rest of the production, perhaps a bland
suspense score with ten minutes of beautiful thematic material alone is
the best we could hope for.
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| Bias Check: |
For John Ottman reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.17
(in 35 reviews)
and the average viewer rating is 3.05
(in 21,438 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.
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The insert includes no extra information about the score or film.
