SCORES WITH BIG HEARTS
| ‘The Shape of Water’
A common theme among the year’s best film scores is an almost old-fashioned earnestness. Perhaps in response to the darkness and trauma in the real world, many movies have abandoned cynicism and irony — and their scores have followed suit by being sincerely, even passionately heroic, romantic, melancholy or inspirational. The subject matter here ranges wildly from depressed painters to feminist icons, from doomed firefighters to the passionate affair between a mute woman and a fish creature — but all are scores with a big, beating heart and worthy of consideration for film music’s top prize.
NICHOLAS BRITELL | ‘Battle of the Sexes’
One of the many new faces at the 2017 Academy Awards was composer Britell, nominated for his sensitive, fragile string score for “Moonlight.” He followed it with a film that, although also involving a socially verboten romance, could hardly be more different.
“Battle of the Sexes,” starring Emma Stone as tennis legend Billie Jean King and Steve Carell as the theatrically chauvinistic Bobby Riggs, is an inspirational sports movie infused with some timely feminism and a very charged love story. Britell’s jumping-off point was the era in which it takes place: the early 1970s.
He conceived of writing a classical score, but performed by a typical ’70s band of electric guitar, electric bass, rock organ and drums. He ended up fleshing that out with woodwinds and strings, but the music — which he recorded on vintage microphones and processed through analog tape filters — gives the film an aural ’70s patina.
“I loved the fact that, on the surface, there’s this huge scope of the match — so there’s this athletic competition, the spectacle and excitement of that,” Britell said. “But what I really loved was the inner stories.”
He wrote a fierce but vulnerable theme for King, which is introduced almost atmospherically under her first interaction with the hairdresser (Andrea Riseborough) who becomes her lover, and progressively grows in determination and scale. For Riggs, a clown on the surface but an insecure and sympathetic man underneath, Britell wrote a theme for a “smoky, intimate jazz ensemble.”
In a subtle touch, Riggs’ theme is always performed on an old upright piano, and King’s on a nine-foot Steinway grand. “There’s kind of a musical metaphor going on there,” Britell grinned.
Those themes duke it out in the titular match, which Britell braided with a competition theme and amplified with rapid arpeggios on rock organ and flutes breathlessly pulsing away.
“After watching it on a big screen a couple times, we felt we wanted more at that moment,” he said. “It needed a big punctuation. You don’t want it to be so huge — it has to feel like an evolution or an outgrowth — but at the same time, I think it deserves that moment. Billie Jean earned it.”
NICK CAVE AND WARREN ELLIS | ‘Wind River’
If anyone has the market cornered on modern westerns, it’s Cave and Ellis. The Australian rocker and his violinist bandmate made their co-scoring debut with “The Proposition” in 2005, and since then have scored “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford,” “Lawless” and last year’s “Hell or High Water.”
The last was scripted by Taylor Sheridan, who made his directing debut this year with “Wind River” — a neo-western set on a snowy Native American reservation, starring Jeremy Renner as haunted game tracker Cory Lambert and Elizabeth Olsen as an FBI agent tasked with solving the killing of a young woman. Sheridan wrote his previous screenplays listening to Cave and Ellis’ scores, and had no one else in mind for this assignment.
“He was clear about the atmospherics,” Cave said — “the wind and the snow, the brittleness and the grandeur, the relentlessness of the weather. He was a dream to work with, actually, as he stepped back and just let us do our thing.”
A ghostly choir stood in for the victims who hang over and motivate the film’s story, which Cave considered the score’s key idea.
“‘Wind River’ seems to be dealing with a kind of disappearing of things,” he said, “of a culture and more pointedly of its people and, of course, Cory’s own daughter. The ghost-choir was a kind of chorus of the missing.”
At times on the soundtrack, Cave quietly recites a poem written by Cory’s daughter.
“I felt that Cory’s expeditions into the frozen landscape were not just a hunter doing his job, but excursions into his own despairing psyche,” Cave said, “and the ghost-choir, the wailing women’s voice and the muttered poetry all added up to a kind of haunting.”
Ellis performed the brittle, searching violin solos and created wintry atmospheric beds made from acoustic instruments like violin and guitar. Another bed he created with his own voice, singing backward and then flipping it and lowering the pitch.
“When you read [the script],” Ellis said, “you could feel that there was so much room for the score to have a voice. And that’s always really thrilling, because it doesn’t happen all the time.”
For Guillermo del Toro’s “The Shape of Water,” composer Desplat had the unenviable challenge of both grounding and accentuating the fantasy in a story that is part fairy tale, part Cold War spy thriller, part erotic creature movie.
“When I saw the film the first time,” he said, “it’s such a flow of love, of energy, of beauty on-screen, of incredible performances. The music has to make you believe that it’s real, but also have this little sense of fable depth, that you’re entering into a submarine world. There’s a current, and you let the current guide you and take you through.”
He was inspired by the fluidity of Del Toro’s constantly moving camera, and by the importance of water to the story. He wrote music for 12 flutes along with harp and other “watery” instruments. Even his main melody for Elisa (Sally Hawkins), which bobs on top of two undulating chords, has “the shape of water.”
Elisa is mute, but she whistles — so her tune is often whistled in the score.
“I whistled on the demos,” Desplat said, “but at Abbey Road, we brought in a world-champion whistler. He was amazing. He could really whistle anything, and in tune, and it was perfect. When we played it back, we realized it was too perfect. [It] had killed the emotion. The fragility in my whistling was just warmer.”
The composer nodded to the mysterious Latin American origins of the aquatic creature by assigning his melody to accordion, played like a bandoneon from Argentina. Whistle and accordion dance in a waltz as the two outcasts fall into friendship, and the themes gradually swell into the full orchestra.
There’s music for the cowardly spy, the wicked military man, and the danger the oppressed protagonists find themselves in — but at its core, the film is a love story, and an unusually earnest one at that.
“It’s Tristan and Isolde,” said Desplat. “There’s no fear of showing love, and showing a love story with elegance, but at the same time with passion.”
latimes.com /envelope
Go online to read about Clint Mansell’s music for “Loving Vincent” and Joseph Trapanese’s work on “Only the Brave.”