MOVIE MUSIC UK

THROWBACK THIRTY

Original Review by Jonathan Broxton

Michael Collins is director Neil Jordan’s sweeping historical drama about one of the most important and controversial figures in the Irish struggle for independence. Liam Neeson plays Collins, who emerged from the failed Easter Rising of 1916 to become one of the principal architects of the Irish revolutionary movement, eventually serving as Minister for Finance in the underground Dáil government and as Director of Intelligence for what would eventually become the Irish Republican Army. Collins was a key strategist in the guerrilla campaign against British rule, but he later became one of the principal negotiators of the 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty, which established the Irish Free State while leaving Northern Ireland within the United Kingdom. The treaty split the republican movement, led directly to the Irish Civil War, and ultimately placed Collins in opposition to many of his former comrades; he was eventually killed in an ambush in County Cork in August 1922.

Jordan’s film condenses and dramatizes this enormously complicated period through a screenplay that focuses heavily on Collins’s relationship with fellow revolutionary Harry Boland, played by Aidan Quinn, and on their increasingly strained association with Éamon de Valera, played by Alan Rickman, the man who would eventually serve as Taoiseach of Ireland on three occasions between 1937 and 1959. Julia Roberts plays Collins’s fiancée Kitty Kiernan, while Stephen Rea appears as Ned Broy, a sympathetic member of the British administration who covertly aids Collins. Ian Hart, Brendan Gleeson, Charles Dance, and a young Jonathan Rhys Meyers also appears in smaller supporting roles.

Michael Collins was a deeply personal project for Jordan and spent well over a decade in development. David Puttnam first commissioned Jordan to write a screenplay about Collins in 1982, shortly after Jordan’s feature-directing debut Angel, and Jordan continued researching and revising the material for years. Several other filmmakers had independently considered bringing Collins’s life to the screen, including John Huston, Robert Redford, and Michael Cimino, but none of those projects reached production. Jordan finally obtained the leverage to mount his film after the successes of The Crying Game and Interview with the Vampire, while Liam Neeson’s post-Schindler’s List stature likewise helped make the project financially viable. The film was a critical and moderate box-office success, and eventually went on to receive Oscar nominations for its cinematography and score.

The score reunited Jordan with composer Elliot Goldenthal, who had written the extraordinary music for Interview with the Vampire two years earlier. By 1996 Goldenthal had developed one of the most distinctive musical voices in Hollywood, blending orchestral brutality, choral writing, electronics, and avant-garde sonorities in a uniquely personal way. What makes Michael Collins so interesting within Goldenthal’s career is how successfully it combines his more abrasive modernist tendencies with an unusually accessible lyricism, especially in the way he brings traditional Irish instruments and folk melodies into his sound.

Goldenthal had written some ‘traditionally beautiful’ music before, of course, including the “Born to Darkness” theme from Interview with the Vampire, as well as passages in scores like Golden Gate and, more briefly, works like Demolition Man and Batman Forever, but Michael Collins was really the first score in which Goldenthal embraced a distinct lyricism for such a large part of the work, and that’s what makes it so compelling to me. Irish folk music is, of course, well known for its juxtaposition of beauty and tragedy, and Goldenthal channels those emotional drivers throughout the score.

The score has three principal musical elements, all of which Goldenthal essentially introduces in the album’s opening three cues: the tragic music associated with revolution and sacrifice, the aggressive rhythmic language of the action sequences, and an intimate melody usually carried by piano and trumpet that speaks to Michael’s relationship with his beloved Kitty.

The superb opening cue, “Easter Rebellion,” underscores a pivotal moment in Irish history and immediately establishes the score’s tragic emotional foundation. The cue features the pennywhistles of Davy Spillane and the wordless voice of the late, great Irish singer Sinéad O’Connor, whose tone emerges above dark strings, heavy bass sonorities, and distant choral textures before the orchestra erupts into big, brutal chords like those heard in scores such as Alien 3, Cobb, and the aforementioned Interview with the Vampire. This is music that feels steeped in history; Goldenthal’s writing conveys pride without triumphalism, acknowledging revolutionary idealism while simultaneously anticipating the bloodshed that will follow. O’Connor’s unmistakable voice is crucial, giving the music an almost timeless quality, like a lament being remembered rather than performed in the present. Her voice is heard throughout the score and becomes one of its key cornerstones.

The mood changes violently in “Fire and Arms,” which introduces Goldenthal’s action vocabulary. The brass snarls against relentlessly aggressive percussion, but the strings are unexpectedly nimble and dance-like, expertly blending with the pennywhistle and the tinkle of a hammered dulcimer, while the rhythmic ideas surge forward with a sense of barely controlled chaos. This writing is closer in style to Goldenthal’s work on Alien 3 and Batman Forever, but the harsher approach is dramatically appropriate for conveying the physical violence of Collins’s world.

The third cue, “Train Station Farewell,” reveals perhaps the score’s greatest surprise, a love theme for Michael and Kitty that remains one of the most traditionally beautiful compositions of Goldenthal’s career. A gentle piano melody, later complemented by oboes and soft strings, introduces the theme; there is a directness and tenderness here rarely associated with Goldenthal’s more bombastic film work, and the simplicity is enormously effective.

As the score progresses, these three approaches continue to dominate, resulting in some outstanding moments. “Winter Raid” showcases the suspense and action, but in a more controlled fashion, building tension through insistent rhythms, dark orchestral pulses, and sharply accented instrumental gestures from traditional Irish instruments, including a wonderful passage for cascading uilleann pipes that sounds more like free jazz than anything traditionally heard on the Emerald Isle.

“Elegy for a Sunday” moves back into the score’s tragic mode and revisits the theme from the opening cues, with banks of weighty strings combining with barely perceptible choral lines to give the music a sense of powerful portent and impending tragedy. The subsequent “Football Match” is one of the album’s most uncompromising passages, in which abrasive, squealing brass eruptions, harsh metallic percussion figures, and dissonant orchestral clusters capture the sudden brutality of the violence that erupts when British ‘black and tan’ members of the Royal Irish Constabulary open fire on fans watching a Gaelic football game at Croke Park in Dublin – an event that would later go down in history as Bloody Sunday. This then leads into the brilliant “On Cats Feet,” an excellent extended suspense and chase cue that combines stealthy rhythmic writing with restless orchestral movement.

“Train to Granard” is an interesting cue, as it is one of the few in which Goldenthal brings more explicit Irish color to the fore in the orchestration. One of the smartest decisions Goldenthal made on Michael Collins was his refusal to make the score an endless parade of obvious Celtic devices. The traditional instruments are certainly present, but they generally function as color within Goldenthal’s larger orchestral language rather than dominating it, and as such avoid the diddly-aye clichés that often litter scores set in Ireland. Their use here, though, is lovely, creating a haunting echo of the traditional music of the location. The similarly lovely “Boland Returns (Kitty’s Waltz)” brings back the theme for Collins and Kitty, this time arranged for trumpet, in one of the album’s warmest moments.

“His Majesty’s Finest” plunges the score back into powerfully dark dramatic writing. Goldenthal’s brass becomes ferocious again, brutally heavy chords combining with jagged figures and pounding rhythms to propel the cue forward. “Boland’s Death” – which underscores the scene where one of Collins’s key allies is killed during the so-called Battle of Dublin in 1922 – is comparatively restrained, refusing to overplay the tragedy, and features some notably effective dulcimer writing, as well as a poignant reprise of the main theme.

After a moment of peaceful reflection and traditional lyricism in “Home to Cork,” “Civil War” returns the score to its overarching sense of tragedy in its depiction of how the Irish independence movement began turning against itself as certain concessions were made to the British, many of which angered Éamon de Valera and his allies. Goldenthal makes excellent use of operatic vocals to heighten the sense of devastating drama, while Sinéad O’Connor’s voice pierces through it all like a beam of light in the darkness.

“Collins’s Proposal” offers another beautifully understated presentation of the intimate theme for Michael and Kitty, but then distorts it with wild, intrusive strings and dissonant brass during the final moments of the piece. “An Anthem Deferred” embraces noble patriotism, militaristic flourishes, and warm orchestral writing as it acknowledges the Irish achievement of partial independence, but it is also undercut by a slight sense of melancholy. This leads into the film’s devastating finale, “She Moved Through the Fair,” which sees O’Connor’s hauntingly sensitive performance of the unbearably prescient titular folk song woven into Goldenthal’s increasingly poignant orchestral material, augmented by pipes and dulcimer. The music underscores the scene where Collins is lured into an ambush by some of de Valera’s associates and assassinated, just as Kitty is happily trying on wedding dresses elsewhere.

Everything culminates in “Funeral/Coda,” an outstanding final summation dominated by strings and built around the score’s elegiac character. It gradually gathers emotional weight and power as it develops, giving Collins’s death a sense of personal grief while also acknowledging the historical consequences of his life that would extend far beyond him. Goldenthal’s outstanding brass and string writing here has the same sort of devastating poignancy as the finale of Alien 3, full of a sense of noble sacrifice. The album finally closes with the traditional song “Macushla,” performed by Ireland’s Golden Tenor, Frank Patterson, a fittingly intimate final connection to Ireland itself.

In my original review of this score from 1997, I was extremely uncharitable in my assessment of it, calling it “uninspiring,” “downright appalling in places,” but “sporadically and tantalizingly brilliant,” while dismissing “Macushla” as an Irish Eurovision Song Contest reject. I clearly didn’t know what I was talking about back then – I really had no way to understand what Goldenthal was doing at that point in my film music journey, and I didn’t have the sophistication or vocabulary to appreciate it, so I stupidly dismissed it all as noise. I was wrong.

For me, thirty years down the line, Michael Collins remains one of Elliot Goldenthal’s most satisfying scores because it achieves an unusually difficult balance. It contains the intellectual complexity, dissonance, violent brass writing, and unconventional orchestral colors that define his musical personality, but it also offers some of the most openly beautiful melodies of his career. The love theme for Michael and Kitty is exquisite, O’Connor’s voice is haunting, and the action writing retains all the uncompromising ferocity one expects from his work. The result is a powerful, sorrowful, deeply humane score whose lyrical themes linger long after its most explosive passages have faded.

Buy the Michael Collins soundtrack from the Movie Music UK Store

Track Listing:

• Easter Rebellion (3:15)
• Fire and Arms (1:41)
• Train Station Farewell (1:56)
• Winter Raid (2:38)
• Elegy for a Sunday (3:07)
• Football Match (1:50)
• On Cats Feet (4:29)
• Defiance and Arrest (1:50)
• Train to Granard (1:31)
• Boland Returns (Kitty’s Waltz) (1:19)
• His Majesty’s Finest (2:11)
• Boland’s Death (1:39)
• Home to Cork (1:19)
• Civil War (2:11)
• Collins’s Proposal (1:25)
• An Anthem Deferred (1:45)
• She Moved Through the Fair (4:57)
• Funeral/Coda (4:33)
• Macushla (written by Dermot MacMurrough and Josephine V. Rowe, performed by Frank Patterson and The Café Orchestra) (3:29)

Running Time: 47 minutes 12 seconds

Atlantic Classics 7567-82960-2 (1996)

Music composed by Elliot Goldenthal. Conducted by Jonathan Sheffer. Orchestrations by Robert Elhai, Elliot Goldenthal, Sonny Kompanek, Deniz Hughes, Ned Ginsberg, Richard Lee and Matthias Gohl. Featured musical soloists Davy Spillane, Liz Knowles, Phil Smith, Bill Moersch, and Jonathan Feldman. Special vocal performances by Sinéad O’Connor. Recorded and mixed by Joel Iwataki and Steve McLaughlin. Edited by Michael Connell and Nick Ratner. Album produced by Elliot Goldenthal and Matthias Gohl.