Music has last word
Art is inherently great — and inherently meaningless. Or rather, its meaning is reserved for the divinely touched few. That message has been hammered into us from “The Waltz King” to “Amadeus” — though I have not gone through Naxos’ list of more than 400 movies featuring classical music to tally the data.
Classical music seems to work most effectively — to leave its tropes, if you will — in films that question, challenge or recontextualize it. Juxtaposing contrasting messages, for instance, can set up a resonant counterpoint, such as the opening sequence of Scorsese’s “Raging Bull,” in which Robert De Niro dances around the boxing ring, as if freed from gravity by the Intermezzo from Mascagni’s “Cavalleria rusticana.”
Another memorable encapsulation of the bad-man-loving-good-art conundrum is the scene in Jonathan Demme’s “The Silence of the Lambs” in which Anthony Hopkins, as Hannibal Lecter, listens to Bach’s “Goldberg Variations,” indicating, not least to himself, that he is infinitely superior to the lumbering guards who bring him his dinner, and whom he brutally murders. Not only does the moment underline the fascination of Lecter, but it also subverts classical music’s wonted role as signifier of the good.
It’s a challenge to introduce a powerful work of art within another one. You lose control of your own narrative. You may not do justice to the work you’re incorporating, and if you do, the audience may wind up focusing on Beethoven rather than on you. This isn’t a problem unique to film: Novelists, too, sometimes attempt to evoke specific works of art they particularly love and then, in the absence of the music, are challenged to come up with prose virtuosic and expressive enough to convey something of the reality to people who don’t know it.
“And then, a bird of like rarest spun heavenmetal, or like silvery wine flowing in a spaceship, gravity all nonsense now, came the violin solo above all the other strings, and those strings were like a cage of silk round my bed,” wrote Anthony Burgess about Beethoven’s 9th in “A Clockwork Orange.” This became a de facto challenge to Kubrick, the director who adapted the novel for the screen, to try to keep the distinctive point of view, because a literal cinematic translation of prose about music would be just a piece of music.
Lonergan clearly has a far more sophisticated appreciation of classical music than many — as “Manchester by the Sea” showed. And I’m sure he would be surprised that the opera in “Margaret” left me so cold. Lonergan, too, was striving to create a counterpoint between the purity of beauty and the complexity of life, and the way that one can lift you above the other. But his love of music here appeared to be essentially cliched as his own artistic response failed him and he simply handed over the reins to the music, letting the “Barcarolle” from “The Tales of Hoffmann,” a very pretty but not very meaningful piece, do the heavy lifting of catharsis.
There’s a huge difference between that and the kind of dialogue Luchino Visconti undertook with the music of Gustav Mahler in “Death in Venice,” in which the music was such a palpable presence throughout the movie that there was something inevitable when it took over the action, as the film faded away to the most slow and sustained images, until the score had swept away the characters and continued unbroken over the death of the protagonist, on over the credits and, perhaps, out the door.
The music has the last word, but the director doesn’t let go of the reins for a moment.