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| Beltrami |
Trouble With the Curve: (Marco Beltrami) After
starring solely in films he had directed for nearly 20 years, Clint
Eastwood handed the helm over to his longtime producer, Robert Lorenz,
and chose to only play the lead in 2012's
Trouble With the Curve.
Eastwood does his best snarling old coot routine in this baseball and
family story, taking the grumpy old man persona to potentially obnoxious
levels. It is fitting that the actor soiled his reputation and damaged
the already-shaky campaign of Mitt Romney for America's president at the
Republican National Convention not long before the debut of this film.
After talking to an empty chair in front of millions at that venue, he
opens
Trouble With the Curve by having a conversation with his
malfunctioning, unresponsive penis (in this case, though, an invisible
Barack Obama seems absent from the equation). He later talks to his car
and other inanimate objects in this film, completing the real-life
sideshow theatrics. As a scout for the Atlanta Braves, Eastwood's lead
is losing his eyesight and therefore his ability to find talent.
Refusing to use a computer doesn't help. With the assistance of his
daughter (Amy Adams), a former recruit and now fellow scout (Justin
Timberlake), and a sympathetic boss with the club (John Goodman), the
old scout takes one last assignment to find a good prospect. Ultimately,
as you would expect, the movie is more about the healing of familial
relations than baseball, and a certain amount of unrealistic sappiness
is inevitable. The film did not meet with immediately favorable reviews
from critics who have grown tired of Eastwood's growling and the
script's formulaic character scenarios. For composer Marco Beltrami,
Trouble With the Curve represented yet another opportunity to
shake his reputation as an artist stereotyped into the horror and
science fiction genres. To this end, he had succeeded with overwhelming
results for the small-scale, religiously-conscious
Soul Surfer in
2011, yielding incredibly effective and emotionally dramatic music that
lifted the film enormously and stood among the best scores of the year.
The same affirming personality exists in
Trouble With the Curve ,
but it becomes clear from the start of the 2012 work that the filmmakers
opted not to allow Beltrami's score to play such a pivotal role in
enhancing the narrative. The result is at times a pretty and innocuous
pleasure but ultimately an inconsequential dramatic effort that
struggles to assert its identity until the very end.
One of the ironies of the music for
Trouble With the
Curve is the plethora of comparisons between the film itself and the
topic of
Moneyball from the previous year. Interestingly, while
Moneyball will be considered by most to be a vastly superior
baseball and family film, both productions suffer from rather bland and
uninspiring music. Beltrami's tone in
Trouble With the Curve is a
bit friendlier than Mychael Danna's had been for the earlier venture,
but a lack of dramatic resolve and impactful gravity connects the two
works. Beltrami does provide, at the very least, a better narrative flow
and some parochial spirit by opening and closing the score with a few
cues of meandering electric guitars meant to address the American South.
Unlike similar usage in Danny Elfman's
Real Steel, however, the
guitars here don't seem to contribute to an overall thematic arc with
which to tie the story together. In fact,
Trouble With the Curve
is melodically anonymous for most of its length, a curious choice given
the positive effect the score's eventual theme (of simple, rising
phrases) starting in "The Real Deal." Beltrami explores a few motifs in
the first two thirds of the score, but none of these ideas blossoms into
a meaningful identity. That leaves the fluffiness of the instrumentation
to carry the personality of the score, and here
Trouble With the
Curve is also hit and miss. At times, as in "Bo's Homer" and
"Another Hit," there are hints of the enthusiasm that graced
Soul
Surfer. The plucked strings, piano, and acoustic guitar in
"Flanagan" and (with more fluid strings) "Mickey's Home Run" offer
moments of liveliness not heard again in the score. Instead, you
encounter extended sequences of nearly inaudible filler material for
strings or piano, not much unlike, intriguingly, a Clint
Eastwood-composed score. Cues like "Post Clogging," "Horse With No
Name," and "Get On the Bus, Gus" practically kill the listening
experience, and the redemption you hear from the orchestral ensemble in
"Trouble With the Curve" and "Not All I've Got," while basically
effective at their task, cannot entirely salvage the listening
experience. The unrelated song "On My Way" at the end of the otherwise
score-only product contains infinitely more life than anything in
Beltrami's contribution. There is an argument to made for a two-star
rating for
Trouble With the Curve, not just because of the
(unrealistic) expectations following
Soul Surfer but also due to
a total lack of genuine warmth and enthusiasm in 90% of this score.
Still, Beltrami competently follows all the basic genre rules and
provides the bare minimum necessary for the music to function.
*** @Amazon.com: CD or
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| Bias Check: |
For Marco Beltrami reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 2.75
(in 28 reviews)
and the average viewer rating is 2.8
(in 19,014 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.
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The insert includes a list of performers but no extra information
about the score or film.
