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Review of What Lies Beneath (Alan Silvestri)
FILMTRACKS RECOMMENDS:
Buy it... if you are prepared to appreciate a technically adept
adaptation of Bernard Herrmann's score from Psycho for the horror
sequences in What Lies Beneath.
Avoid it... if the surprisingly and disappointingly mundane and sparse orchestration of Alan Silvestri's suspense cues for the first half of the film cannot compensate for those snappy moments of Herrmann inspiration later on.
FILMTRACKS EDITORIAL REVIEW:
What Lies Beneath: (Alan Silvestri) Was this film
supposed to serious or was it meant to be satire? A movie like What
Lies Beneath proves that it truly doesn't matter if you place a
director like Robert Zemeckis behind the camera and actors like Harrison
Ford and Michelle Pfeiffer in front of it; if your screenplay is
atrocious, then the film better rely on the humorous antics of the
actors in order to survive. Unfortunately, newcomer Clark Gregg's
screenplay for this film was so uninspired and predictable that critics
universally twisted in their seats, not out of fright but out of
boredom. Ford and Pfeiffer are a wealthy couple who move to a mansion on
the edge of a Vermont lake, and, just on cue, a whole slew of ghostly
things start happening. One of the only redeeming aspects of What
Lies Beneath was an attempt by Zemeckis to raise small tributes to
the master of horror, Alfred Hitchcock, in this project. Some of these
references were built into the script, with some elements stolen from
Psycho and Rear Window, while others involved the typical
flair for camera angles and movement. Another element of the film
saturated with Hitchcock flavor is Alan Silvestri's score, which owes so
much to Bernard Herrmann that it's hard to refer to the music from
What Lies Beneath as being an original work. The collaboration
between Zemeckis and Silvestri had already been extremely fruitful over
the years, but What Lies Beneath was their first outright horror
venture together. It's a genre they really never became comfortable in
thereafter, Silvestri failing to fully embrace the concept of repetitive
stingers of high fright in many other scores. They were reportedly
working on two projects concurrently in 2000, with What Lies
Beneath not even wrapped up in post-production before the two began
looking forward to production on the more popularly anticipated fall
release, Cast Away. (This despite the latter film containing only
a few minutes of score material for Silvestri.) Perhaps Zemeckis and
Silvestri already knew what film and score critics were going to say
about What Lies Beneath, and you're about to hear a
representative dose of that criticism in the words below.
Listeners immediately recognized when What Lies Beneath was finally released that the music for the film, at its best, alternated between rather mundane, stock, horror underscore with shrieking scare tactics and wildly obvious tributes to Herrmann's music from Psycho. As for the eerie parts of the suspense elements, segments including electronics that are more likely to be described as being in tune with Silvestri's own styles, there could be comparisons made to Jerry Goldsmith's concurrent Hollow Man. Some of the cyclical progressions for deep strings and tingling percussion are a foreshadowing of Silvestri's much later The Witches. What's surprising about What Lies Beneath is that Silvestri so rarely flew on autopilot at the time, and the fact that he produced such an uninteresting score for this project is more representative of the kind of predictability from which Goldsmith suffered through his series of equally questionable projects during the 1990's. The suspense cues in What Lies Beneath are a succession of cliched horror ideas, using a regular studio orchestra to provide a small handful of moderately cohesive motifs while meandering through each section of the ensemble alone for long sequences. Silvestri's themes, while nurtured extensively throughout the work, don't stand out enough to serve more than a most basic purpose of connectivity. The ghostly world of the dead woman in the tale is appropriately watery in its characteristics but not really haunting in a fantasy sense, occupying early cues in its combination of a mysterious synthetic motif and a more dramatic, rising string theme on top. That simple theme is the score's de facto primary identity, developed in the second half of "Main Titles" and guiding many of the suspenseful portions of the tale before coming to its natural but oddly understated conclusion in "Reunited/Peace at Last." This idea flows again without much deviation late in the "End Credits" suite. A theme for the lead heroine is established on woodwinds in the first half of "Panic Attack" but doesn't feature as prominently in the rest of the score as you might expect, failing to blend with the ghost woman's material. Silvestri deconstructs this idea badly in an effort to denote the broken character, but the resolution of the score favors the other themes instead. That said, the composer does allow it a healthy dose of development in "End Credits." In between Silvestri's main ideas is a danger motif that punctuates the sense of dread that builds throughout, and it's somewhat fitting that the composer opted to close the "End Credits" with its ominous bass string tones. During most of the score, these themes are bludgeoned by a series of hideous jump scares with strings and percussion. Only halfway through the score does Silvestri begin to open the doors of true horror with an effective crescendo of discovery in "Forbidden Fruit." That cue is interesting in its lack of eroticism, a trait that stunts the entire endeavor to a degree. Once the chasing and thrashing takes hold in the last third of the score, Silvestri lets rip with full orchestral mayhem. At times, listeners will hear a hint of James Horner's dense ideas from Aliens, though most of the material owes significant inspiration to Herrmann's Psycho. Once What Lies Beneath turns from suspense to horror, entire 30-second flashes of action can be attributed to both the preludes to Psycho and, to a lesser extent, Vertigo. The use of brass and timpani for the more rhythmic chase sequences will remind heavily of Torn Curtain. In between these nods, sadly, is lesser material, the quality of these tributes unsustainable for lengthy times. The praise that you heard associated with this score at the time of its release was mostly directed at these moments of Herrmann imitation, and while Silvestri obviously did it intentionally (and likely as a result of direction from the filmmakers), it's hard to get the impression that there's anything truly fresh in What Lies Beneath. That's a surprising statement considering how unique and propulsive Silvestri's scores typically sound, especially with his trademark orchestration. The thematic handling, while deep, isn't particularly effective, only the rising middle three notes of the main suspense theme prevailing in memory by the end. On album, the original 2000 product was one of Varèse Sarabande's later notable "under-30 minute" offerings, missing most of the suspenseful passages in the first half of the work. A 2024 expansion pushes the main score presentation out to 54 minutes and adds a few bonus cues, including Silvestri's studio logo music. The thematic tapestry is much better illuminated on the fuller product, but you also receive a commensurate increase in the amount of truly unpleasant stingers. Most of the outright Herrmann emulation of high volume was already released on the prior album. With either option, Silvestri's music provides little reason, beyond the technical intrigue of hearing Herrmann's music adapted, to attempt to appreciate this score outside of context. **
TRACK LISTINGS:
2000 Varèse Sarabande Album:
Total Time: 29:52
2024 Varèse Sarabande Album: Total Time: 60:02
NOTES & QUOTES:
The insert of the 2000 Varèse Sarabande album includes no extra
information about the score or film. That of the 2024 expanded album
includes notes about both.
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