In a tight Oscar race, music meets noise

View this email online March 9, 2024 by Ann Powers Universal Pictures Note: this newsletter contains spoilers for several Oscar-nominated films. Hello my acolytes of sound and vision, This week I completed my annual couchbound marathon, the only long-distance race I run. As of Sunday, when I actually yanked myself away from the streaming services to take in The Zone of Interest at Nashville’s greatest theater, the Belcourt, I’ve viewed all of the best picture nominees in this year’s Academy Awards race. I pursue this folly because I’ve loved movies for as long as I’ve loved music, and I find music everywhere in the movies I love. And in the Oscar noms I always see a reliable bellwether of trends and preoccupations connecting the cultural spheres. This year, I’m noticing a fascinating shift. In 2023 I wrote about how Hollywood was taking on music as a subject, with films like Aftersun and Women Talking showing how songs can shape conversations, actions and memories. This year filmmakers turned their attention to sound that’s not normally defined as musical. 2024 may be the first Oscars in which achievement in sound offers the most interesting race: The clattering, ominous Oppenheimer contends with The Zone of Interest, whose makers have described it as two films, “one you see, and one you hear,” and Maestro, a sort-of musical that portrays mid-century New York from the perspective of Leonard Bernstein’s symphonic imagination. In each of these best picture-nominated works, sound doesn’t merely support the narrative, it defines it. Sound plays against image, as New York Times critic Alissa Wilkinson has written, to both unsettle the audience and draw attention to itself. This is how we often experience noise, of course. It’s in the background most of the time, but when it bursts through it rearranges experience. The Zone of Interest contrasts the bucolic images of a Nazi family in its comfortable domicile with sounds of screams and gunshots from Auschwitz, just on the other side of their garden wall. It’s a split soundtrack instead of a split screen, with the Höss clan’s conversations constantly interrupted by these outbursts, though they have become deaf to them. This duality utterly unnerved me; I felt the way I would if I’d been sitting at home and heard a weird, unremitting disturbance on the other side of my own front door. The “other story” that sound tells in this film stimulates the urge to act: to get up and confront the menace. Johnnie Burn’s sound design serves as the conscience of the film, the element that demands action, even as the viewer feels trapped watching the mundane inaction of the Germans ignoring the grotesque clamor their own choices generate. Oppenheimer is far more conventional in its sound design – the challenge Richard King faced was to keep the traces of the film’s defining bomb blast present in the scenes preceding and echoing beyond that horrific climax. He succeeded by melding his effects with Ludwig Gorranson’s eerily percussive score. The movie’s most-discussed moment, the detonation of the atomic bomb, unfolds in silence. It’s stunning, but also (let’s admit) a little obvious: The world ends not with a bang, et cetera.  More effective to my ears are the scenes in which sound intrudes on Oppenheimer’s composure, taking him out of the realm of ideas and back into his body, where he has to face the consequences of his actions. Most powerful is the scene after the bombing, in which a cheering and stomping crowd becomes a kind of percussion orchestra compelling Oppenheimer to dance out of the auditorium where he’s giving a speech. Silence descends there, too, but it’s the chorus of feet that lingers: King composes the trampling so that it recalls military marches, riots, frenetic dancing, historic scenes of crowds that menace and compel, their energy overwhelming rational behavior. What happens to music in these sound-rich settings reveals something about the role the art plays in our lives. Oppenheimer barely nods toward it — in an early scene Cillian Murphy drops a needle on a 78 RPM record of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, but that’s just a brief nod toward his interest in the modern.  The Zone of Interest, conversely, considers music both as noise and as a way to defeat silence. Mica Levi’s score only claims the foreground in the moments before and after the film itself: It’s a frame teeming with maggots, astounding in its ugliness, infecting the idyll pictured within the film. Elsewhere, the classical music that SS guards played over the loudspeakers in concentration camps juts out of Burns’s mix; in the film’s final scenes at a Berlin party packed with Nazi officials, similar music becomes distorted by that echo, reminding the viewer that even something so beautiful can become a weapon of the state.  The one song that does stand alone was actually composed at Auschwitz by camp survivor Joseph Wulf. His voice, recorded long ago, surfaces briefly in a scene where a young Polish neighbor of the Hösses sits at a piano contemplating a torn piece of paper; it seems that she picked it up near the camp, where she has been leaving apples for the starving prisoners to eat. As she plays, Wulf’s voice fades away, but his defiant words appear onscreen: We who are imprisoned here, are wakeful as the stars at night. His voice may have been silenced in the camp, but this scene suggests that music can defeat noise at least momentarily, the divine order it imposes making sense of the incomprehensible and outlasting it. Maestro’s relationship to music as an element rather than a subject is complicated, and for me, wasn’t totally satisfying. In key scenes, music takes over (as it must! This is a film about a world-class music maker) but in a strange way. For all of his absorption in composing and conducting, Bernstein’s engagement with the art isn’t explored beyond the clichéd tagline insisting that to make it you must have “summer in your soul.” Certain musical sequences do, however, advance the plot in the classic mode of movie musicals. The queer though closeted shape of Lenny and Felicia’s romance gains definition in a reality-bending sequence that takes place at a rehearsal for his Jerome Robbins collaboration Fancy Free; this “dream ballet” foreshadows both their passion and the price Felicia, Lenny’s beard as well as his lover, will pay for it. Later, after she’s begun expressing her doubts, his vigorous performance while conducting Mahler in a London cathedral renews her devotion; she is simply swept away. These instances of pure music within a film that otherwise fits it into nooks and crannies are cathartic. The first defines the couple’s shared life project of elevating Bernstein’s artistic ambition above all else. The second revels in the fruits of that ambition and justifies the sacrifices Felicia has made to sustain it. Crucial — yet I found both, frankly, corny. They are tent poles holding up a Great Man theory that other aspects of the film slyly undermines. I would have preferred more intimate insights into Bernstein’s artistic process, with him composing at the piano or working with collaborators. (Here’s an essay that further critiques the film’s portrait of Bernstein as an artist.) That might have made for a quieter film, but a more satisfyingly composed one.   Whichever of these three sound-forward films wins in that category (one will, I’m sure, but the other nominees are The Creator and Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One), I’m happy for the lively argument each stages, insisting that music be understood not only as its own phenomenon, but as as a response to noise, an extension of it, or a way of better understanding it.  Other top-nominated films do the same thing in more modest ways. I’m not talking about “I’m Just Ken,” the delightful but conventional high point of the Barbie semi-musical. (If you want an assessment of “I’m Just Ken” and all the other nominees in the best original song category, my colleague Stephen Thompson has you covered.) As much as I love that song-and-dance number (and I have an “I am Kenough” sweatshirt to prove it) I’m more intrigued by the less obvious roles music plays in this year’s films: In The Holdovers, Mary, the school cook played by awards-sweeping Da’Vine Joy Randolph, most powerfully reveals her grief at losing her son in Vietnam when music allows her the space to really feel it. One of the only Black guests at a Christmas party, she’s been saddled with the job of choosing albums to play on the host’s stereo. She puts on an Artie Shaw record — an outdated choice to the ears of some of the party’s younger attendees — and then loses her composure when one of those guests demands that she take it off. Here, music actually conjures a lost love; it brings Mary’s big band-loving nerd of a son back to her side. It defeats the noise of death itself, and she won’t take that needle off the record. Celine Song’s Past Lives similarly, but more subtly, uses music to structure its protagonist’s feelings of loss and, finally, reconciliation. At the film’s end, when the Korean-born, Manhattan-ensconced Nora says goodbye to her childhood love Hae Sun, her ambivalent feelings almost overwhelm her; they stand together in silence, almost but not kissing, with only the hum of traffic behind them. The moment made me long for some further resolution — quickly provided by Song and composers Christopher Bear and Daniel Rossen, whose delicate score enters only as Nora makes the walk back to her home and American husband. The music plays the role of Nora’s own internal conversation about the choice she has made. When Sharon van Etten and Zachary Dawes’s song “Quiet Eyes” comes on over the closing credits, that final cinematic moment has already opened the viewer’s heart, and the song’s intense warmth and sadness feels sublime. I’ll throw in one other favorite musical moment: the dance sequence in Poor Things. As a Yorgos Lanthimos superfan, I lapped up this rococo retelling of the Frankenstein story, though I didn’t love it the way I love the Greek director’s more subtle satires of the human condition, especially The Killing of a Sacred Deer. (Best Barry Keoghan performance ever.) Broader and more derivative than most of Lanthimos’s work, this is a film that swings for the fences. It’s all about the life force — about what literally animates the revenant Bella, from experimental surgery to food to curiosity to loads and loads of sex – and it pays tribute to music as one key channel for vital energy.  When Bella, enduring a desultory dinner with her increasingly uncharismatic lover Duncan, hears the groan of a tuba — actually Jerskin Fendrix, the composer of the film’s vivacious score, playing a weird brass version of a pump organ — her body goes zing. The elation Emma Stone conveys as Bella takes her first jerky dance steps, learning how music can organize the body’s urge to move into coherent self-expression. When Duncan joins and tries to rein in her dance, Stone accepts his advances but continues to lead; she’s not giving up this newest chance to learn how to be herself. It’s a raucously beautiful insight into the way music regulates the chaos of being alive.   When little C-sharp rejoins E major ... ​​​​ Newsletter continues after sponsor message Here are a few things regulating (and enhancing) my life, Oscars-related and otherwise, this week: Hazel Cills and I had fun contemplating the coolness of Kim Gordon on this week’s New Music Friday podcast. Paula Mejia talked to the goddess herself.  I enjoyed Lindsay Zoladz’s list of musicians who appear in Oscar-nominated (or worthy) films, but she missed one I need to shout out: Christian Friedel, whose pitch-perfect performance as the Nazi commandant Rudolf Höss deserved a nom, has fronted Woods of Birnam, a supercool glammy art rock band, since 2011. Check out their music on Bandcamp.  It’s time to catch up on the latest releases with Jazz Night in America’s monthly playlist. Jason Isbell’s turn in Killers of the Flower Moon got lots of attention, but for me, his musical elder brother Sturgill Simpson stole the show as the droll assassin Henry Grammer. (Scorsese’s Biblical sense of humor showed when he made Simpson responsible for Isbell’s movie death.) Seeing Simpson onscreen took me back to the greatest musical moment on a TV show last year: his glorious rendition of “All the Gold in California” on The Righteous Gemstones.  From Oppenheimer to Killers and The Zone of Interest, this year’s biggest films confront past sins and their consequences; if such rumination appeals, I’ve got the Netflix series for you. Nobody does buried secrets as well as the Polish, and The Mire goes deeper than most neo-noir series in uncovering the ghosts of the second World War. Season three is up now. I was really touched by this audio piece from KQED featuring my old friend and L.A. Times colleague Todd Martens, exploring the science behind his broken heart.  Oh, and my vote for an unlikely but deserved win this Sunday? Colman Domingo as Bayard Rustin in George C. Wolfe’s jazzy biopic. That man has verve. Hoda is right — the Sumo is the best winter citrus hybrid. Get them while you can! Introducing NPR Music+, a new way to support what you love and explore new music and conversations sponsor-free. NPR Music+ includes two podcasts with one convenient subscription: All Songs Considered and Alt.Latino, both sponsor-free. Learn more and support us at plus.npr.org/NPRmusic Get NPR Music+ Listen to your local NPR station. Visit NPR.org to hear live radio from WUFT 89.1 (edit station). Need a new playlist? Follow NPR Music on Spotify and Apple Music What do you think of today's email? We'd love to hear your thoughts, questions and feedback: nprmusic@npr.org Enjoying this newsletter? Forward to a friend! They can sign up here. Looking for more great content? 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