SCORES WITH BIG HEARTS
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. Below are two scores with a big, beating heart and worthy of consideration for film music’s top prize.
CARTER BURWELL | ‘Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri’
Carter Burwell is comfortable with irony. The New Yorker is best known for his work with Joel and Ethan Coen (beginning with 1984’s “Blood Simple”), where he has accompanied the duo’s black humor and self-deluded characters.
So working on Martin McDonagh’s “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri,” found the composer somewhat in his element. It’s a film rooted in loss — Frances McDormand’s character has lost her daughter to a violent rape and murder and spends the film at war with the local police — but as with McDonagh’s other films (“In Bruges,” “Seven Psychopaths”), it’s mingled with severe violence and pitch-black comedy.
“I think you could perfectly well have done that film without music, and it would have been completely engaging,” Burwell said, “because of the way he orchestrates his drama and comedy. You’re constantly thrown off balance as a viewer. Whatever your expectation is, it’s confounded, but in a way that’s always fulfilling.”
McDonagh clearly thought it needed music and actually left more open space for the score than in his previous films. Burwell first tried approaching it like a spaghetti western, where each character got his own distinctive motif, but quickly realized that it “simplified them too much.”
“And also, Martin just thought it was too ironical,” he said. “You were just sort of commenting on what was happening, rather than actually being in the film.”
He did respond to the western-like setting and story with rustic music for acoustic guitar and mandolin. When McDormand’s character goes into “Missouri housewife” battle mode, girded in her blue jumpsuit, Burwell accompanied her with a march — “but more like a march you would hear in a Baptist church,” he said, “with guitar and stomping and clapping.”
The other main theme represents the loss that pervades the film, and in this mode the score becomes more earnest.
McDonagh “writes the most appalling violence, and he loves that as a subject, as a tool,” said Burwell. “He loves violence in a way that Scorsese or Joel and Ethan do, but he is a softie at heart.”
ALEXANDRE DESPLAT | ‘The Shape of Water’
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 a love story with elegance but at the same time with passion.”