This week, in advance of the 2019 Oscars, Nick Davis is looking back at the Academy races of 20 years ago, spotlighting movies he’d never seen and what they teach us about those categories, then and now...
the surprise winner
Spotlight Movie: The Red Violin
One of the most exciting things that can happen on Oscar night is when a movie with no other nominations wins one of the “craft” or “technical” or “below-the-line” categories—three bad names for the races where very few contenders are celebrities. In a year like the current one, where the Best Picture nominees ran the table to a historic degree, and consuming most of the spots in every other race, we have even fewer prospects than usual to see this occur. I’d love to watch The Lighthouse win Cinematography or Ad Astra win Sound Mixing, both because they deserve these victories on merit and because it’s nice (but mostly false) to hope that Oscar voters make discerning judgments from category to category based on each discrete department of artistry.
The Red Violin’s Best Original Score trophy at the 1999 Oscars represented one of these glorious instances, and registered as a significant upset at the time...
the shocking defeat
Fairly quickly after American Beauty’s release, Thomas Newman’s music for that film, so adventurous in tone, melody, and instrumentation, had become a key signature for that polarizing, aesthetically risky movie.
Sometimes “Dead Already,” the clangy, distinctive, strings-and-percussion track that helps to open the film, popped up on popular radio during the zenith of that movie’s popularity. As divisive as Beauty may have been and increasingly became among wide audiences, Oscar was obviously a huge fan, to the tune (sorry!) of five prizes in prestigious categories. Newman’s music was widely prognosticated to add to that haul. If he had emerged victorious on this nomination—his fourth, and almost surely the closest he’s come to the winner’s circle—he wouldn’t still be seeking his first Academy Award this year for 1917, on his 15th try.
The statuette instead went to The Red Violin, a Canadian feature as broadly international in its financing as in its story. After triumphant bows (oops!) at 1998’s Venice and Toronto festivals, The Red Violin went on to reap the lion’s share of the big Canadian film prizes of its year. It also became a sizeable box-office hit in the US for Lions Gate Films, still in its relative infancy, albeit a double winner at the previous year’s ceremony with Gods and Monsters (Adapted Screenplay) and Affliction (Supporting Actor). Yes, the film is about its music, which often seems like a major boost to a nominee’s chances in a “craft” category... though if that logic always panned out, The Conversation would have won for Sound, The Devil Wears Prada would have beaten all rivals with a cerulean whip for Costume Design, and Parasite would be trotting to an uncontested Production Design victory this weekend. And yes, the composer was classical-music heavyweight John Corigliano, a two-time Grammy winner by the time The Red Violin premiered, and a Pulitzer recipient only a year after this Oscar ceremony. (He’s earned three more Grammys since.) Sometimes AMPAS leaps at the chance to burnish its brand by honoring a Big Name in another field, but everybody from Noël Coward to Jonny Greenwood can tell you this doesn’t always occur. Besides, Lions Gate had way less money in its campaign coffers than DreamWorks did to promote Beauty, and a year after the perceived snub of Saving Private Ryan’s loss to Shakespeare in Love, that studio was taking no prisoners on the PR trail.
One thing The Red Violin and American Beauty share in common is that they waste no time introducing their audiences to the ambitious music they’ve recruited from their composers, or how central they will prove to the storytelling. The latter is even more directly true in director François Girard’s tale, co-written with actor Don McKellar, which follows the same instrument over four centuries’ worth of historical and musical evolution. A short prologue in the apprentice shop of 17th-century Italian violin-maker Nicolò Bussotti (Carlo Cecchi) is set to low, brooding strings that sound like the work of another Canadian, Howard Shore, who would finally have his own Oscar moment two years later with The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. Only as this short sequence ends, with the violent smashing of a young worker’s subpar instrument, does The Red Violin’s title emerge on screen in four different languages, to the accompaniment of Corigliano’s signature melody, “Anna’s Theme,” a plaintive but robust violin composition (what else?) that will bind together a movie that otherwise sprawls in many ambitious directions.
From start to finish of The Red Violin, we’ll find ourselves in 17th-century Italy, 18th-century Austria, 19th-century England, mid-20th-century China, and contemporary Montréal. In these passages, the blood-red violin of the title is crafted as a gift for a newborn son, then passed to a parentless prodigy with a chance to join a royal court, then stolen by Gypsy grave-robbers (not a high point in representation), then played to acclaim by a real shit-heel of a Victorian-era soloist, then impounded as a Western obscenity by zealots of China’s cultural revolution, and finally put up for auction to an international mix of prospective buyers, who prize this item more than the Stradivarius that goes for a mere $1.95 million in the opening sequence. At the level of story and image, the film is a curious mix of two well-established idioms of upper-middlebrow 1990s cinema: the globetrotting costume drama, though this one uniquely maintains linguistic fidelity to each of the countries where it travels; and the puzzle-box narrative that became a major Canadian export, care of major auteurs like Atom Egoyan, David Cronenberg, Thom Fitzgerald, Patricia Rozema, and John Greyson, as well as Girard himself. The Red Violin sports not one but two framing devices, a tarot reading in 17th-century Italy, which keeps pulling the story back toward uncanny, long-set prophecy, and the present-day auction, where the fate and cultural provenance of the violin seem radically up for grabs.
Corigliano’s music faces the imposing task of repeating key motifs and melodies often enough that such an expansive, culturally eclectic premise does not seem loose or incoherent. These repetitions are also important to establish a core musical identity for the violin itself, as the only linking character across all the episodes. Corigliano conveys the distinction not just of “the” violin but of this violin by writing such compelling solo passages, played by superstar Joshua Bell in what the composer called a “godlike” fashion in his Oscar speech. At the same time, the most privileged passages of The Red Violin’s score must reiterate themselves—sometimes flagrantly and sometimes subtly, sometimes unmodified and sometimes greatly transformed—in individual compositions that obey the historical and cultural particularities of the story’s movements across Italy, Vienna, Oxford, Shanghai, and Montréal.
If that’s not intimidating enough as a degree of difficulty, The Red Violin’s creative team made the decision that none of the period music in the movie would be sourced from the existing archive. Thus, Corigliano had to devise all-new pieces in highly disparate modes, ranging from 18th-century European baroque to Roma-influenced candenzas. And that music not only needed to suit its given period idiom but serve characterization in a robust but efficient way, since we rarely spend more than 20-30 minutes with any of the same people in The Red Violin’s script, and we have to lock in quickly to a basic sense of a) who they are, and b) how they are changing, often quite tumultuously, within the interludes we spend with them. So, just to isolate the 19th-century England passages as an example, Corigliano needed to write such a commanding, intricate, aggressively virtuosic piece for the dastardly genius Frederick Pope (Jason Flemyng) that we would immediately grasp his brilliant ability but also his gargantuan narcissism. Music in these scenes also needed to express his voracious desire for his lover, the quasi-Gothic novelist Victoria Byrd (Greta Scacchi), his terror of losing her during her long voyage to Russia, his giving-over to an opium addiction in her absence, and his new obsession with a Roma paramour. All of this music needed to suit these specific personalities and suggest these other ethnic/national influences while also maintaining palpable bonds to what this violin has always sounded like and expressed across all its picaresque travels. Corigliano even had to compose for what Frederick might be feeling while, erm, laying his instrument inside his new lover’s case, at the very moment Victoria returns from Russia and finds them together—the wildest in flagrante delicto scene since Angels & Insects.
As much as I love what Newman wrote for American Beauty, and as visibly disappointed as he was to lose, it’s hard to argue with Corigliano’s triumph, both in terms of the tasks assigned to him and his gorgeous, meticulous execution of them, in music that has been frequently and independently performed by symphony orchestras around the world. Part of why Corigliano’s music suits the movie so perfectly is that Girard involved him and Joshua Bell as early as the script-development stage. Not only could the composer and the soloist offer input as to the relevant musical aesthetics of the worlds where The Red Violin travels, but they could help shape the emotional frequencies on which the movie unfolds. Corigliano’s famously “architectural” approach to music could even evolve in tandem with the structural intricacies of Girard and McKellar’s screenplay. The Academy’s prize to Corigliano therefore entailed a gesture of due credit to someone whose authorship claim in relation to this dark-horse hit extended to much more than “just” the music.
And since narratives always matter, the prize marked the warmest possible welcome-back to a composer who had only written two prior film scores: one for Ken Russell’s batshit-bonkers reverse-evolutionary sci-fi headtrip Altered States (1980), for which Corigliano secured a prior Oscar nod, and Revolution (1985), a notorious critical and commercial megaflop about the U.S. War for Independence, starring Al Pacino and Nastassja Kinski, which immediately dissipated all the heat in director Hugh Hudson’s post-Chariots of Fire, post-Greystoke career. In Corigliano’s fascinating, detailed interviews about his approach to The Red Violin, he candidly admits that Revolution was ultimately such a disappointing experience (even though Corigliano’s stupidly Razzie-nominated score remains highly admired by music connoisseurs) that he rejected all the Hollywood offers that followed his successes at the Grammys and with Altered States. To wait well over a decade for another script and another musically sensitive director that he knew were good fits for him, and to write music as complex and popular as The Red Violin’s score became, and then to thank Girard, Bell, and his other collaborators on a global stage...what could mark a sweeter comeback in the world of cinema?
Perhaps cognizant that it couldn’t get better than this, or perhaps just swamped with his other commissions and illustrious teaching appointments (former pupils include another Oscar-winning composer, Elliot Goldenthal), Corigliano has never again written for the movies. I doubt he has lacked for offers, and I’ll quickly buy a ticket if he ever does return. Meanwhile, The Red Violin has passed from word-of-mouth hit in the late 1990s to a relative obscurity today, particularly since Girard’s subsequent films, including the current and equally musical release The Song of Names, have fallen well short of The Red Violin’s public resonance. I’m not mad about the movie, which is readily available for rent on YouTube, iTunes, and Google Play, though I appreciate its sweep and its polyglot languages. Its mysteries are no less engaging for being easily guessed, and I enjoy the now-antiquarian spectacle of Samuel L. Jackson playing a recognizable human in a bougie drama, light on profanities and explosions. Most of all, I love the score, and as Nathaniel is constantly reminding all of us, the point of movie awards is to make discerning judgments craft by craft, thus fostering admiring audiences even if every element of a given film isn’t on the same level as its peak qualities. The Red Violin, solid as it is, stands as a perfect demonstration of that philosophy, just as its victory in Original Score remains a welcome instance of a richly deserving winner that nabbed a trophy away from that year’s big Goliaths.
That year’s race.
Part of why pundits mostly didn’t foresee Corigliano’s victory is that he didn’t receive any of the NINE nominations that the Hollywood Foreign Press packed into this category at the Golden Globes. Their winner was another eccentric international co-production, Giuseppe Tornatore’s The Legend of 1900, also strongly driven by its score, also composed by a colossal figure in the field, Ennio Morricone. I still haven’t seen that one, which did not translate to Oscar’s ballot. Beyond American Beauty, The Red Violin’s AMPAS competitors that year included Angela’s Ashes (composed by John Williams), The Cider House Rules (Rachel Portman), and The Talented Mr. Ripley (Gabriel Yared). In addition to most of those, I’d heartily endorse Jocelyn Pook’s score for Eyes Wide Shut, Michael Nyman’s for The End of the Affair, Angelo Badalamenti’s for The Straight Story, and Lisa Gerrard & Pieter Bourke’s for The Insider, all of which found berths in that double-wide Globes race. If you’re going to allow a ludicrously long list, you may as well fill it with great work. Off the awards radar, Howard Shore’s eXistenZ music richly deserves another listen. My favorite composition from that eligibility year was Alessio Vlad’s piano ostinato for Bernardo Bertolucci’s Besieged, which carries just as much narrative weight as Corigliano’s Red Violin music and is even more dramatically thrilling.
P.S. about this year.
When Corigliano won, he became the fourth of five composers in that category to be an Oscar champ, with Thomas Newman the exception. If Hildur Guðnadóttir wins this year for Joker, as I suspect she might, she’ll join fellow nominees Alexandre Desplat (Little Women), Randy Newman (Marriage Story), and John Williams (Star Wars) as Oscar champs, with Thomas Newman again the exception. It would be lovely to see Globe recipient Guðnadóttir win for such a thrilling composition and become, in the process, only the fourth woman to win an Oscar for scoring—and the first woman to win by herself in the single, consolidated category of Best Original Score. (Marilyn Bergman shared her trophy with Yentl’s co-composers Alan Bergman and Michel Legrand, and Portman and Anne Dudley both won, respectively for Emma and The Full Monty, in the quickly-retired category of Best Original Musical or Comedy Score.) Guðnadóttir would also repeat Corigliano’s feat of crossing over from fame in the classical-music world to the film industry’s highest prize. Still, you gotta hope Newman gets to bring home a little gold man at some point soon.