MOVIE MUSIC UK

THROWBACK THIRTY

Original Review by Jonathan Broxton

One of the best romantic comedies of the 1990s, and one of my personal favorite comedies of all time, is Four Weddings and a Funeral, directed by Mike Newell and written by Richard Curtis. It follows the story of Charles, a charming but perpetually single British man, who over the course of a year repeatedly finds himself attending different weddings and funerals involving his extended group of friends. As time goes on, Charles begins a relationship with Carrie, an American woman in England with whom he shares a connection, but struggles to pursue due to various comic obstacles and embarrassing misunderstandings. The film explores themes of love, friendship, and the unpredictability of life, all set against the backdrop of a series of quintessentially British social gatherings. The film launched its leading man Hugh Grant into international superstardom, briefly re-kindled the career of Andie MacDowell, and features a superb supporting cast of British character actors including Kristin Scott Thomas, Simon Callow, James Fleet, John Hannah, Rowan Atkinson, and the late Charlotte Coleman.

A great deal of what I love about Four Weddings and a Funeral is to do with the fact that its sense of humor is essentially identical to my own. It blends sharp, clever dialogue laden with wordplay and innuendo, dryly understated delivery, and elements of self-deprecation, with social awkwardness, satirical commentary on a certain sub-set of upper class British society, and no small amount of farce and physical comedy, all to excellent effect. It also has a completely sincere and un-ironic approach to the film’s emotional core and central message – that love, in all its forms, is something to be appreciated and celebrated, and that when you find it, you must hold on to it with everything you’ve got. Sure, the final scene of Andie MacDowell and Hugh Grant kissing in the rain is all kinds of cheesy, but its heart is in the right place, and you have to admire how sweetly earnest it all is.

Critics and audiences certainly did; it took in worldwide a box office total of $245.7 million off a $4.4 million production budget, it was nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards that year, and it won handfuls of Golden Globes and BAFTAs. At the end of its theatrical run it was the highest-grossing British film in history at the time, and its success inspired screenwriter Curtis to pen a series of similar British romcoms, including Notting Hill (1999), Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001), Love Actually (2003), and About Time (2013), all of which I also adore.

This success also extended to the film’s soundtrack, which was a smash hit in the UK. By far the best known cut from the album is the cover of The Troggs’ “Love Is All Around” by Scottish soft rock band Wet Wet Wet. Curtis specifically approached lead singer Marti Pellow and offered him a choice of three songs to cover; he chose “Love Is All Around,” and the rest is history – the song was number 1 on the UK Singles Chart for fifteen weeks in the summer of 1994, and remains the twelfth-biggest selling single of all time in the UK. I love Wet Wet Wet – they are one of my favorite bands of all time, even though they are virtually unknown in the USA – and although I prefer original works of theirs like “Wishing I Was Lucky” “Sweet Little Mystery,” and “Angel Eyes,” you can’t deny that “Love Is All Around” is a terrific song, an ear worm that is enhanced enormously by Pellow’s soaring blue-eyed-soul vocals, and the jangly guitar arrangement.

Other songs on the album include cuts from Elton John, Barry White, Gloria Gaynor, Gladys Knight, Squeeze, and Sting, which make it a perfect representation of 1980s and 90s pop.

However, people tend to forget that Four Weddings and a Funeral also has a score, written by the great British composer Richard Rodney Bennett. By 1994 Bennett was many years removed from his film music heyday, when he received Academy Award nominations for Far from the Madding Crowd in 1967, Nicholas and Alexandra in 1971, and Murder on the Orient Express in 1974, and his only score of significance in the decade prior to Four Weddings was for the period drama Enchanted April in 1991. Surprisingly, Bennett was only 58 in 1994, still very much in his composing prime, and he responded to the film with a charming, intimate, slightly bittersweet romance score that fills the gaps between the comedy and the pop music selections and explores the more emotional side of the story.

The soundtrack album contains one selection of Bennett’s music – “Four Weddings and a Funeral/Funeral Blues” – which is actually a suite of five cues edited together and which runs for just under 11 minutes. Most of the music is built around the score’s recurring love theme, a gorgeous melody for bass flute and sweeping strings that captures the friendship of the main characters, the various romantic relationships that develop throughout the movie, and Charles’s romance with Carrie, especially Charles’s unspoken but deeply-felt need to love and be loved.

“Carrie’s Bedroom” is just beautiful, elegant and dream-like, a perfect representation of the perfect woman that Carrie represents to Charles, and the intimacy of their encounter. “Before the Funeral” has a darker tone, with appropriately funereal strings and harp glissandi capturing the sense of loss felt by the friends following the death of their avuncular leader Gareth. This is followed by what is by far the score’s most emotionally poignant sequence, “After the Funeral/Funeral Blues,” which underscores the devastating scene where John Hannah’s character Matthew recites W. H. Auden’s titular poem at Gareth’s funeral, and in doing so ‘comes out’ to his friends and shares that the two of them were in a committed long-term gay relationship, at a time when that was still not socially acceptable. Hannah’s dialogue reading is heartbreaking, and Bennett’s tender orchestral support is perfect, low-key but tender writing for strings, piano, and oboe.

“The Morning After” is bright and optimistic, a version of the love theme arranged for curious pianos, lush strings, sweet woodwinds, and harps, which allows Charles’s realization that he is in love with Carrie after all to be brought into focus. The suite concludes with the classic “Love In The Rain” scene, in which Bennett brings the love theme to a gorgeous romantic crescendo, climaxing with a warm Hollywood sweep as Carrie responds to Charles’s endearingly awkward non-proposal with an emphatic “I do”.

Unfortunately, and with the exception of ‘Funeral Blues,’ the album producers made the unforgivable decision to deface too much of Bennett’s score with additional dialogue clips and sound effects from the film, and as such a clean version of the score is badly needed in order to appreciate it properly. It is worth seeking out the performance of the love theme by Rumon Gamba and the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra on the 2000 Chandos album ‘The Film Music of Sir Richard Rodney Bennett’ for this exact reason; not only do you get probably the best recording of the theme out there, you get excerpts of Bennett’s music from Murder on the Orient Express, Far From The Madding Crowd, and Enchanted April to boot!

Ultimately, Four Weddings and a Funeral is probably a soundtrack that will appeal mostly to people like me, who are fans of the film and/or are devotees of 1980s and 90s British pop music, but it does comes a gentle but important reminder that Richard Rodney Bennett’s career did extend deeply into the 1990s, and that he was still writing music of great tenderness, emotional depth, and poignancy long after his ‘mainstream’ Hollywood career ended. I would love for there to be an extended score album at some point in the future – there is more music in the film that is not included on this CD – but for the time being I’m happy that this exists at all.

Buy the Four Weddings and a Funeral soundtrack from the Movie Music UK Store

Track Listing:

• Love Is All Around (written by Reg Presley, performed by Wet Wet Wet) (3:59)
• But Not For Me (written by George Gershwin and Ira Gershwin, performed by Elton John) (3:01)
• You’re The First, My Last, My Everything (written by Peter Radcliffe, Tony Sepe, and Barry White, performed by Barry White) (3:35)
• Smoke Gets In Your Eyes (written by Jerome Kern and Otto Harbach, performed by Nu Colours) (4:26)
• I Will Survive (written by Freddie Perren and Dino Fekaris, performed by Gloria Gaynor) (3:49)
• La La (Means I Love You) (written by Thom Bell and William Hart, performed by Swing Out Sister) (4:45)
• Crocodile Rock (written by Elton John and Bernie Taupin, performed by Elton John) (3:54)
• The Right Time (written by E.W. Art and Ed Smidt, performed by 1 To 1) (3:29)
• It Should Have Been Me (written by Norman Whitfield and William Stevenson, performed by Gladys Knight & The Pips) (3:04)
• Loving You Tonight (written by Glenn Tilbrook and Chris Difford, performed by Squeeze) (4:49)
• Can’t Smile Without You (written by Christian Arnold, David Martin, and Geoff Morrow, performed by Lena Fiagbe) (4:19)
• Four Weddings and a Funeral/Funeral Blues (10:36)
• The Secret Marriage (written by Hanns Eisler and Gordon Sumner, performed by Sting) (2:01)
• Chapel of Love (written by Phil Spector, Jeff Barry, and Ellie Greenwich, performed by Elton John) (3:46)

Phonogram Records/Vertigo 516 751-2 (1994)

Running Time: 59 minutes 38 seconds

Music composed by Richard Rodney Bennett. Conducted by Neil Richardson. Orchestrations by Richard Rodney Bennett. Recorded and mixed by Dick Lewzey. Edited by XXXX. Album produced by Richard Rodney Bennett.