David Gordon Green’s Joe marks a welcome return to his early directing style as displayed in films such as George Washington and All the Real Girls. The film similarly uses the American South as its backdrop and investigates the lives of several very realistic characters caught up within its often restrictive society and conventions. Primarily the film offers the viewer with an interesting portrait of an Othello -like central character - Joe Ransom, played by Nickolas Cage. Despite the film’s success as a whole, I found that the soundtrack was lacking in several regards. Firstly, the music is generally sparse, without tangible substance. It seems to me that the composer- Jeff McIlwain was aiming for something extremely bare and simple which would allow the storyline and characters to shine through. Whilst in a way this was successful, I feel that the score would none the less have benefitted from extra harmonic colours and a broader palate of sounds. As it stands, the composers main approach was to create still swathes of sound using basic materials-sometimes employing only one note over several octaves for instance and using repetitive sound textures and very little harmonic development. In addition he utilizes near constant pedal notes in an ambient style typical of his earlier work as his electonic counterpart "Lusine”. The end result being that the score is highly minimalistic- a bit too much so in my view for such a dramatic film.
I got the impression that through this extreme approach, the composer attempted to underpin the inertia felt by many of the characters in their lives. Despite being one of the most enlightened of the storyline, even Joe himself is caught up in the repetitive cycle of his own addictions and violent tendencies, seeming to be perpetually doomed to repeat his past mistakes despite his well-meaning intentions. However, even if this were the case, I felt that the composer took his intention a bit too far. What I did find successful was the overall tone of the music. Its grim and bleak soundscape succeeded in capturing the brittle nature of life in such a problem ridden level of society, where even your family could sell you out at any moment. Apart from this though, the score could have gained a lot from more of collaborator David Wingo’s input. As is evident in his earlier works for David Gordon Green, his style has much more colour and variety. 10/30.