THE GENERAL'S DAUGHTER

CARTER BURWELL

Rating:

Original Review: Director Simon West burst onto the cinema screens in 1997 with his big, brash, in-your-face debut Con Air, a film which effectively ushered in a whole new era of films with a cumulative effect akin to drinking seventeen cups of espresso coffee - you leave the cinema with eyes like saucers, stunned into submission at the sheer spectacle of what you have just witnessed. Thankfully, Jerry Bruckheimer is not involved at all in The General's Daughter, West's follow up, and therefore it does not bear any of his overbearing influence, although the slick, polished cinematic style associated with his work remains firmly in place.

Starring John Travolta, Madeleine Stowe, James Cromwell and the ever-reliable James Woods chewing the scenery, The General's Daughter is a murder-mystery set on an American army base, in which the daughter of the base commander is raped and killed in brutal fashion under cover of nightfall, and during a training exercise. Enter investigators Travolta and Stowe, assigned to get to the bottom of the case. However, the deeper they dig into the circumstances surrounding the girl's terrible demise, the more they find that their evidence may lead them far higher up the chain of command than they ever anticipated.

Unlike Con Air, which boasted a bombastic and chaotic score from Mark Mancina and Trevor Rabin, The General's Daughter has a score from a somewhat unlikely source - Carter Burwell, a composer whose career to date has been situated firmly in the indie bracket, but whose ascendancy towards the Hollywood A-list music circuit continues at an ever-increasing pace in the wake of such high-profile outings as Conspiracy Theory, The Jackal and Gods and Monsters. In keeping with the generally despondent tone of the film, Burwell's score is dark and ominous, and shares several stylistic similarities with his scores for Fargo and Conspiracy Theory, both of which director West professed to admire.

The opening cue, 'Exercise In Darkness', is superb, sounding exactly like the title suggests. A mesmerisingly mellow, gothically romantic four-minute track for the full orchestra, it ever-so-gradually builds with layer upon layer of deep, sonorous strings, an ever-present timpani rumbling in the background, almost subliminal high-end piano chords, crashing gongs and an occasionally triumphant statement from the horns which hint at an air of tortured nobility. The hesitant central theme bears subtle hints of the Fargo main title, with the melody transposed from strings to brass, but sadly it is not present for long enough for it to capture the attention fully.

The majority of the eleven remaining underscore cues are quiet and smooth, almost eerie, in nature, with tracks such as 'The Body', 'The General's Story' and 'Out of Her Misery' relying heavily on a static string soundwash with added colour from rolling percussion and simple horn phrases, some of which are reminiscent of Howard Shore's less avant garde work. Only occasionally does the orchestra rise to anything resembling a crescendo and, as a result, the loudest cues ('The Conspiracy', 'Kent's Story', 'The Hurt Locker') leave the biggest impression. In addition, cues such as 'Epiphytic Shuffle', 'West Point', 'Footprints' and the warm-sounding 'Congratulations' unexpectedly incorporate guitar riffs into the orchestra, some of which are kept in time by an almost Zimmer-style synth pad beat.

Rounding off the album, released by Milan, is an unfortunately weedy-sounding rendition of Carl Orff's legendary "O Fortuna!" from Carmina Burana, a recording which is well and truly put to shame by the superlative, powerful performance by the City of Prague Philharmonic on Silva's recent Cinema Choral Classics II album; a peculiar music-box style glockenspiel refrain of the old Welsh hymn "All Through The Night" by Ray Colcord; and several adaptations of traditional Negro Spiritual songs, drawn from the Library of Congress Field Recordings archive and electronically enhanced by composer Greg Hale Jones. If you are lucky enough, some of them might make your ears bleed.

Despite the complexities of Burwell's writing and the intelligently unsettling atmosphere created by the music, all the musical restraint shown here tends to become a little wearisome by the end of the CD, and the relative anonymity of the music leaves you craving for a theme of some kind. This hook is the one thing missing from the score - something to bind everything together and make it sound as though it belongs specifically to The General's Daughter and not sound as though it could have come from any old run of the mill thriller. In the end, the only thing which saves it from becoming just that is Burwell's talent for surprising orchestrations and the musical "darkness" that pervades through the entire album. Were is not for these things, The General's Daughter would have been just another faceless Hollywood score which served its film well but had no afterlife, no inspiration and no reason to exist on CD.

Track Listing: Running Time: 50 minutes 35 seconds

Milan 74321-69474-2 (1999)

Music composed by Carter Burwell. Conducted and orchestrated by Sonny Kompaneck. Recorded and mixed by Michael Farrow. Edited by Adam Smalley, Jim Henrikson and Barbara McDermott. Mastered by Joe Gastwirt. Album produced by Carter Burwell.

Cinemusic Online: Review by Helen San
Filmtracks: Review by Michael Lyons
Movie Wave
Score!: Review by Andreas Lindahl
Scorelogue


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