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| Williams |
Sabrina: (John Williams) Remakes of classic Golden Age films
are destined for tough scrutiny from hardened critics and audiences, and while
director Sydney Pollack's revision of the 1954 romance
Sabrina was both
admirable in its adaptation for the 1990's and in genuinely valiant attempts by
Julia Ormond and Harrison Ford to replace Audrey Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart,
audiences never warmed to the picture. Ormond and Ford were simply never Hepburn
and Bogart, despite whatever chemistry they may have sparked on screen. Arguably
part of the difficulty in remaking
Sabrina was the forced modernization of
the story. There was far less romance inherent in the surroundings of a 1990's
world compared to that which existed in the original film. Famed composer John
Williams was brought on board the project to help smooth over that transition and
dependably provide a musical link to the Golden Age. Williams was coming off of
his longest break from film scoring in many years, deciding not to take a scoring
assignment in 1994 and instead focus on his concert tours and a variety of other
projects. Undoubtedly, 1993 had been his strongest year in a long time, with
Jurassic Park and
Schindler's List both destined for greatness, and
Williams had a difficult time living up to heightened expectations in 1995,
especially by his own standards. Indeed, both of his 1995 film projects,
Nixon and
Sabrina, were generally considered failures, and his
music for these films has fallen victim to neglect by even many of Williams' own
fans. In the case of
Sabrina, Williams was returning to a nostalgic age he
was fond of reproduced in his very early years of composition. Long before his
large-scale orchestral efforts, Williams produced echoes of the Golden Age in his
barroom jazz-style compositions. Pollack undoubtedly requested this romantic
sound for the modern incarnation of
Sabrina and Williams responded with a
predictable score straight from that era. Built upon Williams' favorite source of
romance, the piano,
Sabrina is an elegant, classically performed score
unlike anything from the composer in the ten years before or after. But was it
the right move by Pollack and Williams? Perhaps not, for this sound ultimately
fell victim to the same criticism as the film.
There is no doubt that, technically speaking, Williams'
Sabrina is a superior piece of composition, especially for those who
appreciate fine performances on piano. The instrument is the primary source of
emotion in every cue, ranging from the harmonic, rambling performances of the
title theme to the fluid continuation of similar ideas in the conversational
underscore. However, like the film, the romance seems out of place and forced
into a mold that doesn't fit a modern representation of the story. Whether you
hear the music in the film or by itself, you hear Williams trying too hard to
place
Sabrina in the past, losing the authenticity of the elegance that he
could have offered had he allowed that piano to perform rhythms and thematic
progressions of a more contemporary style. It could be argued that several of his
1960's scores are more genuine than
Sabrina in their performances; the
modern ensemble also fails to swing with the appropriate, dancing steps required
to accentuate the excitement of love in the story. In other words, Williams wrote
a functional (and at times beautiful) score, but an emotionally flat one. A solid
example of elegance lost exists in the suite format of his title theme, which
introduces the orchestra after a lengthy piano solo, and during the orchestral
swells, the piano continues to meander hopelessly in the background, nearly
ruining the tonality of the music. The middle portions of the underscore are
uninspired by the romantic atmosphere or seemingly anything else, going through
token motions with a muted trumpet in one cue and an accordion for Paris in
another. The complexity of the continuously wandering piano lines continues, as
it did in Williams' early 1970's scores, often mirrored by a single woodwind
instrument. The "Nantucket Visit" cue breaks the monotony of the underscore for
some brief comedy relief, but when the film and album return to Williams'
arrangements of classic Golden Age dance tunes, the placement of the music in a
context of time is once again placed in flux. Sting's voice is too modern for
Williams' adapted "Moonlight" song, further confusing the era of this score. On
album there is only about 25 minutes of original Williams material to be found,
with arrangements, songs, and reprises comprising the rest of its length. For
collectors of both Golden Age romances and Williams' modern orchestral efforts,
Sabrina will seem just a touch out of place and, like the film, lacking in
a convincing expression of elegance.
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