MOVIE MUSIC UK

THROWBACK THIRTY

Original Review by Jonathan Broxton

When a Man Loves a Woman is a romantic drama about alcoholism. Directed by Mexican filmmaker Luis Mandoki from a screenplay by comedian Al Franken and Rain Man writer Ronald Bass, it stars Meg Ryan as Alice Green, a school counselor, who is married to Michael (Andy Garcia), an airline pilot, and whose outward persona masks the fact that she has a serious drinking problem. Alice is often reckless when drunk, and when one incident results in her endangering her children – nine-year-old Jess (Tina Majorino) and four-year-old Casey (Mae Whitman) – she finally agrees to enter a rehabilitation program. While Alice recovers, Michael must take on more responsibility at home and learn to cope with the challenges of supporting his wife through recovery. As such, the film portrays the complexities of their relationship, highlighting both the strain caused by Alice’s addiction, and the depth of Michael’s love and commitment.

The film was mostly a critical success – Roger Ebert gave the film four out of four stars and called it “a wise and ambitious film about the way alcoholism affects the fabric of a marriage” – and Meg Ryan was especially praised for her against-type performance, shedding the clean-cut girl-next-door image she cultivated in films like When Harry Met Sally and Sleepless in Seattle for something darker and more serious. She would eventually receive a Screen Actors Guild Award nomination for Best Female Actor in a Leading Role, but unexpectedly got overlooked by the Oscars.

Musically, When a Man Loves a Woman is interesting because it comes during the ‘Hollywood studio period’ of Polish composer Zbigniew Preisner. Preisner had developed a significant career for himself in pan-European cinema during the preceding decade, scoring numerous acclaimed films for director Krzysztof Kieślowski, and receiving significant praise for scores such as The Double Life of Véronique, At Play in the Fields of the Lord, and Damage, as well as the Three Colors trilogy. Preisner won three consecutive Los Angeles Film Critics Association Awards for Best Score between 1991 and 1993, and came to Hollywood in 1993 at the behest of his fellow Pole, director Agnieszka Holland, when she was hired to make a new film version of the classic British children’s story The Secret Garden for Warner Brothers. The success of The Secret Garden led directly to Preisner being hired to score When a Man Loves a Woman, which would go on to become the highest-grossing film of his entire career.

It has since become clear that Preisner did not enjoy his time in Hollywood. In an interview that my colleague James Southall and I did with him in London in 1999 he mused; “I do not like to work in America. Nothing attracts me to go there. I do not like glare. I am interested in creating something different – a new reality. In America, even directors are regarded as virtually nobody with respect to studios, let alone composers. I am interested in musical creativity, and there just isn’t the time to do it in America at all. Few people are willing to take a risk on something new.” He went on to say; “In L.A., you can either accept what you are told to do, and do it that way, or do nothing. For me – I don’t accept. If a director wants a score in an American style, he should get an American composer. If they pick me, then they must go with what I feel is appropriate or get someone else. In Hollywood, everything starts and finishes with the budget of the film. It is obscene that actors get $25m for two weeks’ work. It’s very bad, you know. That’s the budget for a small nation. Everybody is afraid to make decisions. In Europe, the artist has more chance to be creative. My favorite composers are the ones who work in Europe – Nino Rota, Ennio Morricone, Michel Legrand. I like to create something new with music – otherwise, what’s the point?”

Despite this less-than-favorable experience, the music that Preisner ultimately wrote for When a Man Loves a Woman is undeniably lovely. It was recorded in Poland with the Sinfonia Varsovia, conducted by Wojciech Michniewski, and is a small, intimate, romantic score that explores the different strands of the relationship between Alice, Michael, their children, and Alice’s addiction, with sensitivity and tenderness. It would be easy for a composer to write a score that is overly-sentimental to the point of mawkishness for a film like this, but thankfully Preisner avoids falling into that trap entirely, writing music that instead feels appropriately emotional, but never manipulative.

The score is written mostly for strings, woodwinds, and piano, with support from a harp and a small amount of light percussion, plus a tiny bit of brass in one cue. The “Main Title” introduces the score’s recurring main theme, a tender melody for woodwinds backed by harp and acoustic guitar, which is warm, heartfelt, and gentle, almost like a lullaby. This theme comes and goes frequently throughout the score, acting as a recurring theme for Alice and Michael’s relationship, but Preisner gets an unexpectedly large amount out of his limited ensemble, subtly changing the smallest details to convey a wide range of emotion. In “Garbage Compulsion,” for example, Preisner’s woodwind textures have a little more uncertainty to them, while the string sustains in the background add tension to convey the destructive allure of alcohol in Alice’s daily life.

“Homecoming” features a beautiful new piano melody, romantic and elegant and imbued with an identifiable European classicism, and which is given an increasing sense of lush emotional poignancy when the strings come into support it during the second half of the piece. It may be my choice for the highlight cue of the entire score. In the subsequent “I Hit Her Hard” Preisner’s lovely string writing is intelligently juxtaposed against the devastating scene where Alice admits to her husband that she hit their daughter Jess while in a drunken stupor, making her distraught confession even more moving; the use of cello here is notably excellent. “Dressing Casey” is a pretty, childlike melody that features a notable solo for a recorder, and is backed with tinkling glockenspiels to add a touch of magic and wonderment.

“Gary” is a secondary theme representing Alice’s friendship with a fellow recovering alcoholic played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, and the way their relationship helps Alice overcome her drinking demons. “Michael Decides” reprises the main theme in a little more forthright and profound variation that features the merest hint of brass to give it a little more weight, but which is still beautifully rendered for the strings and woodwinds. This leads into “Alice & Michael,” the finale cue that accompanies the conclusive scene of the couple reconciling their differences and agreeing to support each other for the good of their children; here, Preisner presents a soft, almost dreamlike version of the main theme for woodwinds and hazy strings, that ends the score on a slightly downbeat but wholly appropriate emotional note.

One little piece of trivia for film music fans is the fact that the final cut of the film includes some additional music written by a pre-Matrix Don Davis. It’s thirty years since I have seen the film, and none of his music is included on the soundtrack album, so I have no memory of what it sounds like, but it’s an interesting titbit nevertheless, and one specific cue called ‘Mike & Alice’s Restaurant’ is credited to him in the end titles crawl. I wonder if Preisner fell behind schedule and the studio had to call Davis in to finish a few scenes?

The aforementioned soundtrack album also includes three songs: the 1966 soul classic “When a Man Loves a Woman” by the great Percy Sledge, after which the film is named; Brian Kennedy’s cover of the 1969 romantic ballad “Crazy Love” by Van Morrison; and the more upbeat “El Gusto” performed by Mexican-American rock band Los Lobos.

When a Man Loves a Woman is a short score – when you take out the songs, the whole thing runs for just a touch over 15 minutes – but for me it represents what is probably the pinnacle of Zbigniew Preisner’s Hollywood career. It is one of the most conventionally attractive and romantic orchestral scores he has ever written, and features numerous gorgeous passages for strings and woodwinds, plus a great deal of perfectly judged emotional content. Hollywood might have not suited Zbigniew Preisner – he wrote just two more studio film scores before returning to Europe before the end of the millennium, never to return – but When a Man Loves a Woman shows that he was more than capable of delivering excellent music for major studio projects, when given the right canvas to explore. The fact that he and the studios mixed like oil and water leaves me retroactively missing all the potential Preisner scores for mainstream American films we never got to hear.

Buy the When a Man Loves a Woman soundtrack from the Movie Music UK Store

Track Listing:

• When a Man Loves a Woman (written by Calvin Lewis and Andrew Wright, performed by Percy Sledge) (2:51)
• Crazy Love (written by Van Morrison, performed by Brian Kennedy) (3:47)
• El Gusto (Son Huasteco) (written by Elpidio Ramirez, performed by Los Lobos) (2:56)
• Main Title (2:00)
• Garbage Compulsion (1:27)
• Homecoming (2:23)
• I Hit Her Hard (3:35)
• Dressing Casey (1:23)
• Gary (2:02)
• Michael Decides (0:57)
• Alice & Michael (1:04)

Hollywood Records HR-61606-2 (1994)

Running Time: 24 minutes 25 seconds

Music composed by Zbigniew Preisner. Conducted by Wojciech Michniewski. Performed by Sinfonia Varsovia. Orchestrations by Zbigniew Preisner. Additional music by Don Davis. Recorded and mixed by Geoff Foster, Rafal Paczkowski and John Richards. Edited by Roy Prendergast. Album produced by Zbigniew Preisner.