Filmtracks Traffic Rank: #1,469
Written 2/25/12
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Buy it... if you have infinite patience for Rachel Portman's pretty
and understated techniques for innocuously romantic situations, this
entry punctuated by the nice touch of guitar contributions written by
Michael Brook.
Avoid it... if only a couple of minutes of genuinely warm,
orchestral depth in an otherwise minimally contemporary score cannot
justify a very short and rather bland, score-only album release.
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| Portman |
The Vow: (Rachel Portman/Michael Brook) Hollywood
has a knack for "religiously sanitizing" existing concepts in the
process of adapting a true story into a silver screen event, usually as
an effort to seek the widest audiences possible for their products.
There have been exceptions in the years prior to 2012's The Vow,
most notably The Blind Side and Soul Surfer, but studios
tend to avoid Christian-based messaging in movies in most circumstances.
This removal of faith was the source of some discontent with The
Vow, which is based upon the true story of a newly married New
Mexico couple who suffered an automobile accident that left one of them
without any memory of the other. They had originally met via long
distance correspondence and had married due in part to their equal
commitment to Jesus Christ, and their faith guided them in the process
of rediscovering each other after the accident. In The Vow,
however, the leads played by Rachel McAdams and Channing Tatum respond
to the same adversity simply because of a secular Hollywood formula and
nothing relating to religion, a choice by the studio that safely yielded
immense fiscal returns that made the film, for a few weeks, the highest
domestic grossing movie of the year to that point. Unless you are a
young man in desperate need of getting laid, there is really no reason
for your demographic to witness the kind of pointless spectacle that
unfolds predictably in The Vow. Set in Chicago, the movie only
uses stock footage of that city as a stand-in for filming in Toronto,
and equally wasted in the picture are Sam Neill and Jessica Lange in
woeful supporting roles. Director Michael Sucsy tackled The Vow
as his first major feature film, his only previous endeavor the popular
HBO movie Grey Gardens of 2009. Reuniting with Sucsy from that
project is composer Rachel Portman, long a veteran of writing innocuous
music for romantic dramas. Early in the process, the director and
composer agreed that Portman's history of writing broad orchestral
material would not suit the personality of The Vow, and the two
of them opted instead for an intimate, smaller scale presence to anchor
the film in the place of an extensive song-related soundtrack. The
result is still not particularly abnormal for Portman, but her method of
achieving that end did take an unexpected turn in this assignment.
In the process of diminishing the depth of volume in
the score for
The Vow, Portman made the determination that the
sound she was developing for the lead female character needed a
stylistic counterbalance to represent the male lead. She thus struck up
a collaboration with Canadian composer Michael Brook to supply a
guitar-led personality for the second half of the score. Brook is not a
major name in the film music community, though he did contribute to some
Hans Zimmer scores of the early 2000's and has written a few solo works
since (most notably for Al Gore's
An Inconvenient Truth). His
expertise with guitars of all varieties is utilized well opposite
Portman's standard piano and orchestra-based sound for
The Vow,
producing a contemporary blend that plays much as one would expect for a
Portman effort that has been spruced up for an urban romance setting
with electric and acoustic guitar. It's somewhat odd that Portman sought
the assistance in this particular case, because she has proven herself
more than capable in the past at handling guitars of all natures.
Nevertheless, she and Brook collaborated extensively on most cues for
The Vow, each writing thematic material and Brook sometimes
adding his own layer to Portman's base material. Ultimately, the
execution of the score sounds like an 80% Portman emphasis, her melodic
and instrumental sensibilities still dominating the soundscape. The
guitar work really does mesh well with her traditional sound, however,
almost approaching similarly conceived Danny Elfman territory. There are
two recurring themes in the score, logically, the grittier, guitar-led
identity in "Come Home With Me" and "First Base," an affable, slightly
Country-Western idea. On the other hand, you have Portman's
piano-defined waltz in "An Outsider" that swells into the full ensemble
highlight in "Packing It Up," by which point it starts to exude the
composer's deep melodramatic touch. Interestingly, the two themes never
swap instrumentation, a somewhat disappointing conclusion to the album
with the cues "Remember" and "Wedding Vows" simply repeating the two
themes in their respective base instrumentation. When the
instrumentation mingles well, the themes are typically absent, an
unfortunate aspect of "A Few Questions" and "Hard For Me Too." Overall,
The Vow is a score that achieves everything it sets out to
achieve, and with the exception of the grim "A Moment of Impact" that
opens the album, there is never a challenging moment. But there's
practically no unique substance on the 27-minute score-only product, the
collaboration so fluid that it becomes mundane fast.
** @Amazon.com: CD or
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Bias Check:
For Rachel Portman reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.31
(in 30 reviews) and the average viewer rating is 3.26
(in 28,139 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.
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