A romantic fantasy from director Kogonada, A Big Bold Beautiful Journey stars Margot Robbie and Colin Farrell who embark on a series of unusual adventures to places from their past. A meditation on the nature of love, fate, loss, grief – it struggled to find an audience, with many finding it somewhat confusing.
There was some fanfare surrounding its score, because it is (somewhat amazingly) the first composed for an American film by the great Joe Hisaishi. Now in his mid 70s, and unquestionably one of the finest film composers on the planet, he hasn’t exactly been short of work over the years but it’s still quite a surprise it has taken him this long to score a Hollywood film.
Of course, he’s no stranger to meditative fantasy films – his extraordinary body of work for Studio Ghibli and Hayao Miyazaki in particular is of course what has made his name, and no doubt what made this film’s makers seek out his services.
The good news is that he hasn’t watered down his style in any way – the score is everything you might expect it to be if you’re familiar with his music in the last few years. For large parts the composer writes impressionistic little vignettes – they teem with life, the (often small) ensemble used at any time positively dancing around – it brilliantly teeters between romance, comedy, adventure. The score’s opening half is dominated by a single theme – it isn’t ubiquitous, but isn’t far from it.
I should be clear: this is not fantasy in the sense that Princess Mononoke or Spirit Away are fantasies – don’t expect big, epic music because that simply isn’t what A Big Bold Beautiful Journey is. It’s contemplative fantasy – dazzlingly colourful strokes across a large canvas. That main theme is not one you’ll be walking around humming, but it certainly leaves its mark in other ways from the ingenious construction of the many, conflicting moods.
“Memories of Dad” is a great example of that line that much of the score so carefully treads (though it largely eschews the theme actually) – there’s a sense of melancholy, sadness, regret which somehow gets presented in a way that comes so close to pushing over to joy, hope, even comedy.
I mentioned that most cues are played by small ensembles but all sections of the orchestra are featured at some time or other, with such delicate colours being provided by piano, harp, pizzicato stings, tuba, clarinet and many others taking the lead at different times.
This extremely delicate balance is occasionally broken by more traditional expressions of emotion (interestingly, these tracks are typically labelled as “bonus track” even though they appear within the main body of the album). The haunting mystery of “The Door”, the choral beauty of “Silent” – these are substantial pieces of music.
As the score moves on, so does the style – the almost kaleidoscopic variations on the main theme retreat, the mood becomes more delicate, the romance a little more overt. In “Earth Kiss” we’re firmly in love – with the music, through the music – everything has been built so carefully to get to that emotional high of the moment – and then we briefly face the more prominent emergence of tension and sadness before the magical final twist.
Reaction to the score seems to have been almost as lukewarm as reaction to the film – while I understand that those who came in expecting something in a different style may have been disappointed not to find it – I have to say that as I have listened to this over and over since its release a few weeks back, it has gradually taken me under its spell and seems richer and deeper with each new listen.
It’s such a clever piece of work, and it’s one that doesn’t sound like any Hollywood score there’s ever been. We all complain about how homogenised mainstream film music has become, well here’s one that very much isn’t. While many of the tracks are quite short (there are 40 minutes or so of score across 22 tracks) each is constructed so nicely that it never feels bitty – everything flows so naturally from one place to another, and the sense of it being a series of connected vignettes is very deliberate. It’s a beautiful piece of work, full of emotion.
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