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| 5. “Morgen Marschieren Wir,” All Quiet on the Western Front
I didn’t love this highly aestheticized vision of trench warfare, but kudos to director Edward Berger for resurrecting a patriotic march that did, in fact, fill the throats of thousands of soon-to-be-felled German soldiers in the cataclysmic First World War. This scene shows how a song can compel violence, becoming a weapon both deployed by and pointed at the ones who sing it. Points off because Volker Bertelmann’s heavy-metal-inspired score encroaches on the young mens’ voices as they hotfoot toward their deaths.
4. “Great Balls of Fire,” Top Gun: Maverick
Another pre-battle scene, this one in a military academy’s local watering hole, is positively Springsteenesque in the way it blends nostalgia and regret using the power of early rock and roll. It’s expertly edited to show how even the most overplayed rock and roll chestnuts can still carry personal meaning. As young upstart Rooster (Miles Teller) bangs the piano and his fellow recruits bellow along, our temporarily exiled hero Maverick (Tom Cruise) listens, stunned and bereft, outside the bar window. Images of another man at the piano — the cadet’s late father Goose, Maverick’s best friend, who was killed in a training accident decades before — flicker through the scene as triggered memories. The agony Cruise projects, breaking through his character’s bravado, makes the scene work. His dislocated sadness perfectly communicates the lonely feeling of hearing a song that everyone loves — that you once sang with joy — but which wounds you.
3. “Nearer My God To Thee,” Women Talking
In her adaptation of Miriam Toews’ novel of ideas about rape and resistance set in a Mennonite missionary outpost, director Sarah Polley takes pains to show that for devout people, music is not merely an ornamental complement to speech; it is speech transformed into prayer and sustenance, its intensity upholding belief in the face of senseless violence. As the women debate whether they should leave their oppressors or try to reform them -— as they harangue each other, break down and struggle to maintain compassion and strength -— they resort to hymns when spoken words fail. Most powerful is the risky pause they take to sing one of Christianity’s most familiar musical balms in the moments before they leave the compound. I’ve seen some reviewers question whether anyone would interrupt an escape for such a banal reason. Those critics clearly don’t understand religious music. That union of voices is what makes their escape possible as they gather strength from a tradition they are about to transport and remake.
2. “Are You Sure,” To Leslie
If you’ve ever been a barfly, you know that the song played at closing time can hit hard. This naturalistic portrait of an alcoholic woman sliding around bottom and fighting all the way conjures that last-call feeling and forces the viewer to sit in it long enough to really grasp its tragedy. As Leslie, alone and drooping, nurses the night’s final beer and shot in the haven that’s turned into her prison, Willie Nelson’s desolate drunkard’s lament pours out of the jukebox. She scoffs at the painful accuracy of lines like “look at all the lonely used-to-be’s,” but the scene doesn’t end with that moment of recognition. The camera focuses on Riseborough’s protean face — angry, crushed, hardened, crumbling — and the scene continues for the whole length of the song. Doing nothing but listening, Riseborough sinks under the music’s slow current, her response a form of self-exposure as eloquent as any dramatic monologue.
1. “Losing My Religion,” Aftersun
Aftersun deserved many more Oscar nods than the one lead actor Paul Mescal received; its fractured depiction of a fateful father-daughter vacation, through the eyes of the child clinging to its promise and her grown self reconstructing it decades later, realizes the full potential of filmmaking grounded in the personal. Fans have singled out the final scene, in which Mescal’s Calum dances to glam classic “Under Pressure” with his kid Sophie (played by the remarkable Frankie Corio), as the film’s bittersweet high point. But I was stunned by another song’s framing effect.
It’s karaoke night at the shabby-ish resort where the pair are holed up, sneaking meals and drinks not on their plan; in past years, mundane activities like singing together have added up to form something like tradition. But not this evening. Sophie has signed them up, and takes the stage when her name is called, but Calum refuses. So there she is, all five-feet-two of her, left to mutter and croon and flat-note her way through “their” R.E.M. ballad alone. What’s remarkable about this scene is that it doesn’t cut away. Director Charlotte Wells leaves Corio in the lurch for the entire length of the song. It’s very hard to watch — my husband and I actually started singing along on our couch, as if we could help Sophie make it.
This completely unprettified scene says so much about the little scars that parents caught in their own crises can inflict upon their children, and about how children strive to overlook and overcome them out of love and fear and innocent pointless optimism. Michael Stipe’s lyric, written about a different kind of abandonment, becomes Sophie’s testament and plea. She owns it even as it wrecks her, and it says more than she could ever say on her own. |
More to read, watch and hear about the music of the 2023 Oscars |
- All Songs Considered host Robin Hilton recently interviewed the composers behind two of this year’s nominees for best original score: Volker Bertelmann, who scored the recent adaptation of All Quiet on the Western Front; and Son Lux’s Ryan Lott, who scored Everything Everywhere All At Once.
- Gustav Mahler's Symphony No. 5 is a haunting presence in the Oscar-nominated film Tár, about the rise and fall of the fictional conductor become real life meme Lydia Tár. Mahler 5, as it’s known, is also a calling card for rising conductor Rafael Payare, who just released a recording of it, and is currently performing the symphony on tour in his first season as music director of the Montreal Symphony Orchestra. He spoke to NPR Classical’s Tom Huizenga about Mahler, Tár and the evolving art of conducting.
- The Oscar nominees for best original song can be anything: ubiquitous Disney bangers, soaring ballads that play over closing credits, bombastic hits that soundtrack musical numbers, somber dirges reflecting dramatic themes. What they are not, my colleague Stephen Thompson would forcefully argue, is all equally worthy of an Academy Award. As is his tradition, Stephen ranked all of this year’s nominees; plus, he and his Pop Culture Happy Hour co-host Linda Holmes had a conversation about which song should win, which song will win and what makes a great original song.
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