It’s Not Underscore, It’s Underpinning

There is a particularly telling moment in “The Talented Mr. Ripley” when one of the characters contemptuously describes jazz as “an insolent noise.” It is a reference that the film’s writer-director, Anthony Minghella, says “couldn’t be further from the truth.”

Yet the dramatic importance of the line is underscored toward the end of the picture, when the same character repeats the phrase. It’s one small indication of the way in which music expresses the film’s emotional currents and defines the lead characters, both of whom are musicians of a sort.

“I tried my best to imagine that you could hear the story as clearly as you could watch it,” Minghella said last week during his first break after finishing and promoting the recently opened film. “Even if that’s not clear to anybody else, it was clear to me. The film actually begins with a kind of A-B, A-B, jazz-classical debate. At first, jazz seems to triumph. But after that, as the story makes its dramatic change, the music turns to a much more classical mode and we get Vivaldi and Bach.”

At that point, the thematic threads begin to weave as composer Gabriel Yared’s music, with its contrasting fragments of jazz and classical elements, gives life to the picture’s complex structure.

“Ripley” is one of three recent pictures in which music in general and jazz in particular play key roles. “The Legend of 1900,” released in the fall, is about a pianist, raised on a cruise ship, who matures into a brilliant musician. In one scene, he pits his playing against that of famed jazz artist Jelly Roll Morton.

Woody Allen’s new film “Sweet and Lowdown” showcases another musician, the eccentric ‘30s jazz guitarist Emmet Ray. The music--assembled by a frequent Allen collaborator, pianist Dick Hyman, and performed by guitarist Howard Alden--is straight out of the New Orleans and swing-era styles favored by Allen. And the Ray characterization, played to the hilt by Sean Penn, is everyone’s fantasy of the weirdo jazz musician.

“The Emmet character reminds me of musicians’ tall tales,” Hyman explained, “when they talk about the wonderful/awful things that musicians like Joe Venuti and Jelly Roll Morton supposedly used to do. . . . And, you know, Howard Alden told me that [legendary guitarist] Django Reinhardt himself actually had a special golden moon built for him and did fall off it [a scene played out in the film]. Isn’t that an ironic connection?

“But, you know, despite his offbeat qualities, Emmet may be the strongest male lead that Woody’s ever put in place of himself. In fact, he turned out to be such an original character that you can’t even describe him as a Woody surrogate.”

Equally important, added Hyman, who has worked in various capacities--arranger, composer and musical director--on numerous films with Allen, including “Everyone Says I Love You,” “Mighty Aphrodite,” “Broadway Danny Rose,” and Zelig.” “Woody has always spoken about wanting to do a jazz movie someday, and I think he’s finally done it.”

Despite their attractive musical qualities, however, neither “1900” nor “Lowdown” reveals the densely layered musical qualities intrinsic to “Ripley.” The association between Minghella and Yared, which resulted in an Academy Award for the score for “The English Patient,” is clearly enhanced by the fact that Minghella is a trained musician, and that Yared considers himself a composer, as opposed to a film composer.

“Anthony knows that when I say about myself, ‘I’m not a composer for film,’ I don’t mean it arrogantly,” Yared said. “The truth is that, even though I’ve written many film scores, I don’t have the culture of movies because I don’t usually go to theaters. . . . I have to start to feel and think the music almost from the beginning.”

Which is an approach that works perfectly for Minghella, who noted, “I have to find my way into a screenplay musically, always. Even though I was a university lecturer in literature, that’s never the way in for me. It’s always to do with music.”

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For “Ripley,” music played an immediately apparent audio and visual role while underlining, sometimes in subliminal fashion, the progress of the story. The most obvious musical presence takes place via the juxtaposition of jazz and classical music, with Dickie Greenleaf (Jude Law) as the amateur jazz saxophonist (in the Patricia Highsmith novel on which the film is based, Dickie was a second-rate painter) and Tom Ripley (Matt Damon) as a classical pianist.

“It seemed very appropriate to me to turn Dickie into a jazz player because he makes such claims to live in the moment and to be an existentialist himself,” Minghella explained. “At the same time he characterizes Ripley as a square, identifies him by the corduroy jacket as being the straight man. . . . But what we discover is that Ripley is a great improviser as well, and that Dickie in turn is actually a rather conventional character who aspires to things, to fridges and cars and stuff.

“Look at it this way: An improviser, whether it’s a jazz player or J.S. Bach, the greatest improviser, anticipates the changes and works from them. And that’s exactly what Ripley is doing all the time. In fact, I always felt that when he opened his mouth, he knew the key but had no idea of the notes. He sort of hears them with us as they come out and believes them. And it’s like he lies and believes in his own lies, just as, in a way, a soloist in music lies and believes in his lies.”

Yared was part of the imaginative process early on, providing themes underscoring Minghella’s views of the principal characters.

“It was clear to me that the music should be like Ripley, neither saying that it loves jazz or classical music, and I wanted to underline his anomie,” Yared said. “So for one part of his theme I used a kind of syncopation to suggest something, a movement something like when one leg doesn’t come down at the same time as the other leg. I thought that this was a great way to give form to a character in the movie through music rather than words.”

The creative partnership between Minghella and Yared was equally vital when it came to the process of enhancing the film’s dramatic themes, particularly three vital points.

“First of all, there’s the fact that Ripley is largely a reactor,” Minghella said. “He’s in every scene, but he doesn’t say a great deal; he’s a watcher and a listener and a reactor. And it seemed to me that there was a nostalgia in him, but a faux nostalgia, a nostalgia for a life he desires rather than a life he’s had. As I thought about that, I kept thinking about Proust and how he becomes obsessed with a particular melody in ‘Remembrance of Things Past,’ and I asked Gabriel [to] try to find the equivalent of a Proustian theme for Ripley.

“We also began with the notion that the film was a series of strangely romantic encounters. So Gabriel wrote the Ripley theme as a way of trying to corral that, a sort of swooning theme with a series of discordant platforms which carefully shy away from anything too lyrical.”

Minghella had one final point he wanted to connect between script and music, a connection that subtly resonated with the role of the chorus in Greek tragedy.

“I had this notion,” he said, “that there was a sort of fatalistic quality about Ripley. If he hadn’t borrowed a jacket, if he hadn’t done this or that, things might not have happened the way they did. I felt that the gods laughed at him a little bit in the film, laughed at his aspirations, laughed at him saying he was Dickie Greenleaf at the first opportunity he has to lie. So we came up with a kind of siren vocalization whenever he collides with fate in any way, and these sort of barrier voices come in and tempt him, then laugh at him with sounds rather than melodies.

“It was a way of symbolizing how Ripley was tugged toward a destiny that he thought he wanted, with no idea of what it was going to cost him.”

It is, by any estimation, a full plate of connections between music and script, and probably couldn’t have been made by a director lacking Minghella’s intimate understanding of the creative process of making music.

“I love music,” he said. “I love the energy of music. I love the idea that people can come alive through the combination of music and films. One of the problems with the way music is used in film--and I know there are very good reasons for it--is that music tends to show up so late in the day, long after there’s been a temporary score in place. It’s paralyzing to the composer, and it reduces music to a kind of gloss on the film.”