Movies To Listen To

There are two flavors of movie soundtracks nowadays, those which consist of original compositions and those which are collections of popular songs picked for their relevance to the theme at hand. Actually a lot of modern films have a mixture of both, and I feel there is a lot of art in the approach to either. Music can still make or break a film for me, and I feel the person in charge of conceptualizing the music for the following films did an excellent job, often transforming the celluloid into a gesamtkunstwerk that would make Wagner proud.

Crumb – This documentary about the underground psychadelic cartoonist Robert Crumb is an amazing peek at the subconsciousness of one of counter-culture’s greatest heroes. Crumb’s nostalgic sensibilities lead to his unilateral dislike of modern music, and so director Terry Zwigoff populates the background of montage scenes showing samples of Crumb’s work with old blues and jazz music, much of it retrieved from Zwigoff’s own collection of 78s.

The most poignant of all is a simple piano rag which plays as Crumb’s “America, A History” visually tells the story of the transformation of American society from pastoral beauty to post-industrial ugliness. You wouldn’t expect a rag to sound so sad, but it perfectly outlines the sense of hopelessness felt in the face of the battering onslaught of human progress.

Shawshank Redemption - Though you could consider this a populist movie (currently ranked #2 all time by users on the Internet Movie Database – The Godfather is #1) it has always amazed me how well it holds up over time. If it’s showing on some non-premium cable channel I am compelled to watch it to the end, half-hour commercials and all. One of the reasons is the final scene where Morgan Freeman is walking up the beach to see Tim Robbins working on that old boat. It is accompanied by some of the most beautiful and uplifting music I think I’ve ever heard.

The subtitle of the Stephen King short story the movie is based on is “Hope Springs Eternal”, and this music is the perfect embodiment of that. It caps off a very memorable sequence that starts when the Freeman finally gets out of jail. He initially finds it hard in the real world, and we think he will surely meet the same fate of Brooks, the elderly ex-con who earlier in the film had hung himself. Instead, with the immortal words “Get busy living, or get busy dyin’, that’s damn right,” he decides that life is worth the struggle after all, and we are treated to one of the best movie endings ever.

As he walks up the beach, the strings of the orchestra hang as if suspended in the air, flirting with resolution but not quite getting there, much like the Adagietto movement from Mahler’s Fifth Symphony. It’s the freeing of a spirit that’s been held down far too long. It sounds corny, but I can’t watch the end of this movie without having a better outlook on life afterwards.

Fargo – the haunting violin which begins and ends this Coen Brother’s masterpiece is the work of Carter Burwell, probably the best original movie music composer out there today. He has scored every one of the Coens’ film, but I think his work on Fargo is his best. The violin is almost like a funeral dirge, accompanying the images of cars rolling through the blustery snowy landscape of a Minnesota highway in winter.

We don’t understand the significance of these images quite yet, that these are police vehicles chasing down the protaganist who has had his wife kidnapped. Instead they are just beautiful images accentuated by the music that could stand on their own as an art piece. The film has some very funny parts, but this music portends the somber nature of the plot before we are introduced to a single character. Then at the end of the film it brings us back full circle, this bittersweet melody bookending a sad morality fable that could happen anywhere, not just in Minnesota where everyone seems to talk funny.

Gattaca – Now I know what you’re saying – Gattaca? You may have never seen this movie or even know who was in it, but it is another one of my favorite movie soundtracks. In it, Ethan Hawke plays Vincent, a character in a society so obsessed with genetic perfection that he is denied admittance to Gattaca (the future’s version of NASA) on account of his inferior DNA. He was “God-born”, i.e. without the aid of the genetic enhancements that would have guaranteed his success in society’s upper echelon.

Still he is determined to beat the agency at it’s own game by borrowing the identity of Jerome, a test-tube baby non-pareil played by Jude Law. Law’s character decides that being too perfect can have it’s downside, however, and it’s actually the music which accompanies his suicide at the end of the movie that always makes me cry. At the same time Vincent is blasting off into space on his first mission, Jerome incinerates himself in the chamber the two had previously used to burn away any trace of Vincent’s inferior skin cells and hair follicles.

I always get choked up watching this scene, I can’t really explain it. There is sadness for Jerome, but triumph for Vincent. The music soars with the power of the human spirit, much like in Shawshank, only this time in a minor key that lends a sobriety to the celebration. At the end we are left with Vincent’s spare monologue – a simultaneous expression of hubris and humility:

“For someone who was never meant for this world, I must confess I'm suddenly having a hard time leaving it. Of course, they say every atom in our bodies was once part of a star. Maybe I'm not leaving... maybe I'm going home.”