 |
| Jóhannsson |
Sicario: (Jóhann Jóhannsson) If
you're tired of having a delightfully fabulous day and you want an
ultimate downer of an examination of humanity, then pair up a Donald
Trump political speech with the 2015 movie
Sicario and your
attitude about the world will cloud up pretty damn fast. Ultra-gruesome
societal dramas like this are made in part to enthrall viewers with the
notion that sensationalistic corruption and vigilante behavior are
actually realistic and also to translate that depressingly stark
depiction into the kind of relentless grit that solicits year-end
awards. Much praised on both fronts was
Sicario, a tragically
depressing and harrowingly violent glimpse of America's involvement in
the drug wars of the Mexican/American border and an equal indictment of
the cartels and sleazy law enforcement. In many ways,
Sicario is
for the drug cartels what
The Godfather was for the mafia, but
without any of the romanticism. Director Denis Villeneuve's vision of
this part of the world offers little redemption and absolutely no hope,
the glorification of Benicio del Toro's character's seemingly mechanized
killings so embraced by a society of disillusioned Trump voters eager
for verification that the world is a terrible place that Lionsgate
quickly explored the possibility of making a franchise of films based on
his performance. Needless to say, a movie like
Sicario is not
meant to be a pleasant experience, and the same is understandably the
case with its music. The assignment took Icelandic composer
Jóhann Jóhannsson closer to his roots than his popular
success for
The Theory of Everything had done, this continued
collaboration with Villeneuve benefitting from positive press and
significant awards consideration due to the composer's newfound
reputation and the brazen awkwardness of the music. Villeneuve's
instruction to Jóhannsson was to create an ambient soundscape
that is as much felt as it is heard. The goal was a primordial musical
extension of the sound effects mix, and Jóhannsson provided
exactly that type of score. Lively debate will ensue about whether the
application of music as sound effects is brilliant, lazy, or not even
music at all. For those listeners tired of hearing easy harmony and
saccharine tonal melodies in their film scores,
Sicario could
indeed be a nice change, and you thus see people throwing awards
consideration at it for being "different." In truth, however, ambient
sound-effect scores have existed for a long time and there's nothing
revolutionary about what Jóhannsson did here.
There has been much banter about how intelligently
Jóhannsson's music for
Sicario is constructed. Mostly
acoustic at its root, the score still features synthetic manipulation
that either dulls the environment or intentionally supplies a clipping
effect to the mostly percussive performances. An orchestra exists to
growl most of the time, bass strings and brass presenting the score's
only recurring motif (a descending minor-third slur heard first in "The
Beast" and again in "Tunnel Music") while a percussive heartbeat effect
connects sequences in between. The composer throws in subtle orchestral
colors here and there, as in "Convoy," but these occasional chirps are
not the norm. Expect the key to stay the same throughout every cue, the
notes to rarely shift and what little melody exists to be fragmented.
Fuller ensemble cues present only broken chord whole notes of despair,
as heard throughout the pivotal "Balcony" cue at the end. The problem
with this music is not that it really isn't music at all, but that it's
not that intelligent in the first place. There's no narrative poignancy
within the music itself, and when Jóhannsson begins to explore
such territory in the final two cues, the first with child vocals
dominated by the main two motifs in conjunction ("Soccer Game") and the
latter with nearly insufferable layering of the vocals as a theme for
del Toro's vigilante, he fails to adequately develop any kind of
catharsis other than increased amplification and the suggestion of dead
children with the vocals. A cue for an important scene such as "Fausto,"
for instance, accomplishes nothing that a sound effects editor couldn't
do by sampling the sound of industrial machinery and manipulating it.
When you couple that atmosphere with the highly repetitive nature of
every cue, the same tone, key, and meter employed from the fade-in to
the fade-out, you have an extremely boring and simplistic work. Don't
believe all the hype you hear about "subtleties" in this score, because
outside the skittish layers of the ensemble in "Convoy," and "Night
Vision," you hear very little actual creativity in this work. The
electronic distortions of basic percussive rhythms are eye-rolling, a
cue like "Surveillance" the kind of noisy muck that any inexperienced
composer could generate without a second thought. Even as a horror
score, which it definitely is, the work doesn't make much attempt to
present a dichotomy of good and evil where one exists, the sole respite
in "Melancholia" for solo acoustic guitar in no way reflecting the true
battle of wills in the character interactions. Overall, the score for
Sicario rumbles like a beast as intended, and it achieves its
very basic function as yet another layer of dirty, dreadful haze in the
film, but music like this has little purpose on album. It's an ordinary
and insufferable ordeal.
@Amazon.com: CD or
Download
- Music as Written for the Film: **
- Music as Heard on Album: FRISBEE
- Overall: *
The insert includes a short note from the director but no additional
information about the score or film.
