: (Shaun Davey) Any enthusiast of author
John Le Carre can provide you with a long list of Hollywood motion pictures that
have shamelessly butchered his stories in the process of their adaptation. In an
effort to rectify that situation, Columbia Pictures allowed Le Carre to serve as
both an advisor to the screenplay and executive producer for
, one of the better films from the wildly inconsistent director John
Boorman. With a story of espionage and intrigue between the governments of the
United Kingdom and Panama in which Pierce Brosnan stars as a British spy not
popular with MI6,
caused many audiences to expect that
the film would adhere to the normal boundaries of the James Bond franchise. That's
definitely not the case, but using this appeal as a peripheral marketing tool, the
production was highly touted as a late spring blockbuster in 2001, with a strong
supporting cast, clever story, and an exotic setting to boot. But as abruptly as
the press and advertisements for this film ended in April of that year, it
disappeared from theatres as a stunning loss, forcing audiences to seek arthouse or
older theatres to see it. The cause of the film's failure still remains open to
debate, but even more curious is the consequent obscurity of Shaun Davey's
high-impact score for the film, a score that quietly passed without any significant
fan comments or review coverage at the time of its album release. The shame about
the failure of the film is that it didn't give Davey the career boost that he could
have used to exhibit his talents for a larger international audience. He had only
scored very few feature films in the previous five or so years, and was (and still
is, to a large degree) best known for the scores to the British films
. Although the latter score had been released on
a somewhat obscure Silva Screen album, the majority of film music collectors were
unfamiliar with his work because
represented his first
major American project. It was with high hopes that this Boorman film, regardless
of its box office failure, would change that situation. Despite the score's
extremely appealing strengths, however, it ultimately did little to advance the
composer's career.
In the most basic sense, the style of Davey's compositions is
naturally similar in its lyrical and light-hearted personality to that of Stephan
Warbeck, who had already won over the world with his music for
Shakespeare in
Love. Davey's close regard to the classical construction of his music, and his
prior experience in the scoring of Shakespearean stories, put him in the same
musical league as Warbeck and Patrick Doyle. These parallels in composition can be
heard in
The Tailor of Panama, especially during the several grandiose,
fully orchestral performances of governmental fanfares contained within. The title
theme and its underlying rhythm (a dedicated motif for the element of intrigue
throughout the score) both exude a flash of pomp and spirit that could very well
accompany a Shakespearean drama, but the score is ultimately saved by a balance of
this lyrical bravado and Davey's keen insertion of Latin elements into the mix. No
better of an example of this exotic combination is the cue "Harry's Drive Through
the Carnival," which melds a fantastically verbose performance of the adapted
melody to "Todavia Cantamos" on strings with an exuberant flair of acoustic guitar.
The influence of Victor Heredia's "Todavia Cantamos" remains consistent throughout
the work, often informing cues that explore variations on the theme. Davey
restrains the adaptation to a troubled viola solo in "Louisa's Confrontation and
The Death of Micky Abraxis," exhibiting the impressive flexibility in manipulation
heard in each of the score's ideas and contributing to a very cohesive whole. The
original theme representing the title character delicately flutters in the score's
opening and closing moments, also sometimes existing in slightly dissonant variants
(such as the start of "Harry Unravels"). Its functionally is overshadowed by its
rhythmic counterpart, a bass motif that Davey consistently uses to represent the
element of espionage and adventure in the plot. Davey showed flashes of this kind
of heavy, bass-oriented orchestral rhythm in
Twelfth Night, but he never
expanded upon it for that project. For
The Tailor of Panama, however, Davey
dwells on this single, simplistic bass string progression, accenting each measure
with a blast of the low woodwinds, brass, harpsichord, and even an accordion for
additional power.
Together, all of the rumbling, lower range elements of the
orchestra prevail to set a rambling, ominous tone for the pace of the story. It's a
great rhythm-setting device given the genre, and while some may find the idea
tedious and droning, it's rather easy to adopt it as motivational inspiration. The
final major element of
The Tailor of Panama is its Latin flavor, which Davey
accomplishes through the use of acoustic guitars and several choices of
orchestration and thematic progression. At times, as in the wildly infectious "The
Vibrating Bed," Davey kicks the guitar into full gear and produces a result not far
from Rachel Portman's more comical moments of
Chocolat. During the action
sequences, and especially in "The Ambassador, the Chase, and the Helicopter," one
could get the impression that this score is also an undeniably fun cross between
Warbeck's
Shakespeare in Love and Jerry Goldsmith's
Under Fire. Even
with the Latin elements expressing themselves fluently throughout, the score never
becomes too ethnically foreign for those who would rather attach themselves to the
classical structure of the rest of the score. Davey's greatest accomplishment here
is his ability to take all of the different aspects of his music for
The Tailor
of Panama and bring them together in a fabulous crescendo as the film reaches
its exciting climax. In very few scores do you hear this kind of rhythmic
effectiveness, with the score's momentum constantly maintaining your interest. The
final track offers a surprising rendition of the "Todavia Cantamos" theme with a
longing female vocal performance that steals the show in a way that would have been
further welcomed had it been worked into a few sequences earlier. Overall, the
careful balance between the grand, free flowing themes, the Latin guitar and
keyboards, and the rhythmic orchestral bass is very well handled in
The Tailor
of Panama. The music has a little bit of everything, and yet it stands together
so well as a whole that you wish other scores could balance themselves with equal
success. It's potentially a "hit or miss" kind of prospect, meaning that it could
completely leave some listeners out in the cold due to its flair for the
melodramatic and its occasionally bizarre ethnic diversity. One can only wonder how
the Irish Film Orchestra managed to pull off such a convincing Central American
performance, but they did it, and
The Tailor of Panama on album is a guilty
pleasure in waiting for many film score collectors.
**** @Amazon.com: CD or
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