Do yourself a favor as you're reading this. Pop over to Spotify, iTunes, Amazon or wherever, and search on Hamlisch, Marvin and 'The Informant!' You'll be glad you did -- and it may add a whole other layer of joy to the moments to follow.
Hamlisch, who died Tuesday, carved a wide swath through American popular culture as a composer, tastemaker and an appreciator. His interest in ragtime drove him to fill 'The Sting" with Scott Joplin tunes and revived a vanishing part of American musical history for a new generation; 'A Chorus Line' helped define fashion and music of the '70s; and his work with Barbra Streisand is beyond reproach. The wit, inventiveness and pure freedom of his compositional mind not only added layers to his various projects but also on a bigger scale, his melodic personality became the instrumental soundtrack of the 1970s and '80s.
PHOTOS: Marvin Hamlisch
A world of great critical writing has deservedly honored Hamlisch in recent days, but it's his under-appreciated final film score, for Steven Soderbergh's 'The Informant!,' that first came to mind when I learned of his passing. The quirky 2009 comedy stars Matt Damon as the real-life Mark Whitacre, a naïve middle manager at rural Illinois food processing corporation Archer Daniels Midland who turns FBI informant, only to become so obsessed with his case that he makes ridiculously bad decisions. It's the closest Soderbergh's ever come to making a Coen Bros. movie.
Connecting it all is Hamlisch's score. Over the film's 108 minutes, his musical ideas are used by Soderbergh as a kind of wordless commentator on Whitacre's internal -- and often hilarious -- monologue, a Greek chorus of bouncing brass, tense strings and secret-agent guitar lines that moves seamlessly with the plot.
When Whitacre meets with special agents for the first time, represented as 'Car Meeting' on the soundtrack recording, Hamlisch wittily references his own past as a James Bond film composer of 'The Spy Who Loved Me.' 'Polygraph' arrives as Whitacre straps into a machine to answer some questions, and Hamlisch and Soderbergh fill the moment with a joyous Appalachian fiddle romp that underscores the character's down-home and naïve belief in his own version of the truth.
Moments of beauty are everywhere. 'Boxes' recalls Bernard Herrmann's work on 'Taxi Driver,' and with it an unspoken acknowledgment that a darker instinct may be at work in Whitacre's head. In other moments, a baritone saxophone intermingles with a human whistle a la Henry Mancini, while muted ragtime trumpets weave through the mid-range.
Hamlisch's score for 'The Informant!' was nominated for a Golden Globe, but it wasn't nominated for an Oscar that year, which is a shame (Michael Giacchino won with "Up") as it would have capped a vital career and reminded viewers of Hamlisch's singular style, one with a compositional breadth that drew on nearly all the film score work that had come before it.
RELATED:
Marvin Hamlisch, maestro of the perfect note
Without Marvin Hamlisch, some uncertainty for 'Nutty Professor'
Marvin Hamlisch dies at 68: award-winning composer of popular music
0 comments:
Post a Comment