They Shoot, He Scores

In Notes on a Scandal, there’s a moment in which the outwardly dowdy, inwardly scheming teacher Barbara—played by Judi Dench—gets the thing she desires most in the world: an invitation to the home of her pretty colleague, Sheba (Cate Blanchett). Is a touch too much to hope for—maybe even more? She arrives at the steps to Sheba’s flat, and the soundtrack music quickens its pulse and swells as she climbs (la-la-la) ever higher (la-la-la), with the door (LA-LA-LA) just in reach (LA! LA! LA!).

As scoring, it’s a tricky task. Barbara’s deluded passion may be pathetic, but if the music turns to outright mockery, the movie’s careful ironic balance tips toward cruelty. How to evoke the intensity of her feelings, and yet communicate the madness behind them? Just call Philip Glass, whose music surges with hidden undertows.

Glass’ witty score for Notes combines romantic sweep with a seething undercurrent of florid melodrama. It’s a new facet in a lengthy film-composing career that spans stylized biopics (Mishima), gory horror (Candyman, a genuinely chilling score) and form-breaking documentary (The Fog of War). A smartly curated three-film mini-fest next week makes a strong case for the expressive adaptability of his recognizable sound.

The usual Glass gripe is that his pieces are audio Chinese water torture—simple musical phrases repeated ad infinitum with minimal variation, amounting to a kind of canned vertigo. But that repetition produces striking effects. In Errol Morris’ true-crime mystery The Thin Blue Line (Feb. 13), a meditation on the unreliability of witnesses and limited human perspective, the somber theme accompanying the reenactment of the pivotal murder alters slightly with each new iteration: it makes you doubt what you heard the first time.

The other two scores are essentially sacred music for a profane age. For Koyaanisqatsi (Feb. 12), Glass devised a sonic landscape of awe and skepticism. As time-lapse nighttime photography turns a congested big-city traffic grid into a neon beehive, the trills on the soundtrack evoke a giddiness bordering on hysteria. For the staggering last shot—a spacecraft’s heroic liftoff and agonizing Icarus freefall in flames—Glass layers growled Hopi vocals over a spiraling cathedral-organ figure, a slow-motion dirge for man’s overreach.

Throat singing replaces chanting in the incantatory score for Martin Scorsese’s Kundun (Feb. 14), possibly Glass’ most varied film work. It’s an evocative mix of clattering percussion, discordant male voices and repeated melodic phrases that ascend ecstatically. In these three films, at least, there’s none of the emotional button-pushing that typifies much contemporary scoring. Glass’ scores serve as a tide that carries the movie along—not a firehose to be directed at the audience when things get too quiet.