Just in case you haven't seen it, I should start by explaining that The Freshman is a comedy starring Marlon Brando and Matthew Broderick. It's a supreme gift: a chance to see Don Corleone in action again, this time taking more delight in life. For someone who loves The Godfather (me, for example), The Freshman is exquisite—sheer perfection.
The first song in The Freshman that I have come to love, "Mona Lisa," gets played when Broderick dances with Brando's daughter in her family living room:
As horrible as this sounds, I have to admit I never used to like this type of "old-timey" music, and I never understood all the fuss about the Mona Lisa. Yet I absolutely love this scene. It's so intimate. Dance has moved out of the clubs and the crowds, and into the embrace of a young couple dancing alone in the living room, in the middle of the day. It's like pulling stars out of the night sky, or having the original Mona Lisa in your own living room, as Brando does here ("Now I'm happy, sugar. Now I got the Mona Lisa"). Against the odds, this "Mona Lisa" song found its way into my heart.
And then there's Tony Bennett's song "I Wanna Be Around," which plays while Brando gracefully ice skates with an older woman:
This scene both echoes and reverses the Mona Lisa scene. This time, an older couple goes public with their private dance. Mona Lisa goes on tour.
And music is crucial here, too. Tony Bennett's silky-smooth rendition of "I Wanna Be Around" in the background captures Broderick's feelings as he watches the skating from the balcony: a confused mixture of affection, desire, hurt, and bemusement.
The whole scene is so perfect it makes my heart ache.
This is really strange, though. I don't usually find my heart aching over images of large men ice skating, and as I said before, this kind of crooner music used to leave me flat. In fact, lately even my own favorite musical genres, rock and cumbia, no longer move me the way they used to. (The only artist that still consistently moves me is Van Morrison, making my gratitude to him soar to impossible, religious levels.) I'm trying to figure out, then, what's going on with my reactions to the music in The Freshman.
On the few occasions when I have told other people about my recent inability to get excited about music, they treated it like a ritualized complaint about the traffic--"Yeah, it's bad, but what can you do?"--and then quickly moved on to the next topic. Maybe that's because, as Stanford biologist Robert Sapolsky showed, most people spend their entire adult lives listening to the same music they heard as kids; only 5% of people branch out into new musical genres after age 35. Sapolsky makes an interesting point about the comfort of childhood music: "There's a stage in childhood in which kids become mad for repetition, taking pleasure in the realization that they are mastering the rules. Maybe the pleasure at the other end of life is the realization that the rules are still there--as are we."
True, I do take comfort in the old songs, but lately I'm finding that they're an iron cage. I can't take in new music because it's too different from what I know, but I'm also tired of the music I do know. Apparently this is a common problem, based in the brain's wiring, as Jonah Lehrer notes: "...the corticofugal system is a positive-feedback loop...This only encourages us to listen to the golden oldies we already know...and to ignore the difficult songs that we don't know...."
I'm deeply grateful to The Freshman, then, for helping me break out of this feedback loop. This soundtrack provides me with the pleasure of something new, but at the same time something familiar. It reassures me that I'm still alive. I can still feel. And no matter how far away I may be from my parents' generation, we're still connected.
More specifically, it was The Godfather and this blog that brought me to this point. After I mentioned Sinatra in my eulogy post for Johnny Fontane, my friend Mark A. told me I really needed to listen to more Sinatra. I did, and, after awhile, I found that I was getting into it. The song that first got me was "The Way You Look Tonight," mostly because it starts off with that same wonderful, muffled trumpet sound that plays when Tom Hagen's plane is touching down in California, on his trip to see the movie director in The Godfather.
It usually takes thousands of experiences to change your musical taste, and even then, it doesn't happen 95% of the time, but this one Tom Hagen scene and music clip, which don't last more than 5 seconds, changed me; they provided a bridge to the music in The Freshman and beyond. That's the power of music and movies: they can move your soul in new directions, even when it looks like they're telling the same old stories.
So, as Bert Parks sings at the end of The Freshman, "I ain't gonna' work on Maggie's farm no more."
More about The Freshman
2009 Report that They're Making a TV Series about The Freshman
2010 Interview with Matthew Broderick and Director Andrew Bergman. Contains gems like this: Laurence Olivier wanted to play Larry London.
DVD of The Freshman. Doesn't contain any special features, but the Spanish voice-over for Brando is fantastic. This actor masterfully captures in Spanish the nuances of Brando's voice and speech patterns.
Roger Ebert's 1990 Review. Ebert called it right, as usual, from the very start:
"He [Brando] is doing a reprise here of his most popular character, Don Vito Corleone of 'The Godfather,' and he does it with such wit, discipline and seriousness that it's not a ripoff and it's not a cheap shot, it's a brilliant comic masterstroke."
More about Sinatra and Bennett
Sinatra once said, "for my money, Tony Bennett is the best in the business." And Bennett has been so inspired by Sinatra that in 2001 he founded the Frank Sinatra School of the Arts, a high school in Queens. For more, you can read this 2009 Vanity Fair article by Bennett, age 82.
But, of course, Sinatra and Bennett were not the same. For example, in a recent interview about his new biography of Sinatra, James Kaplan notes that Sinatra sang with more sadness than Bennett, calling Sinatra's style "an almost operatic version of the blues." You can listen to this characteristically insightful Christopher Lydon interview here.
Posts
0 comments:
Post a Comment