Noteworthy Scores And Soundtracks: Hans Zimmer’s Frost/Nixon

Hans Zimmer – Insanely Risky

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After nearly a decade of studying film scores, this much I can say — Hans Zimmer doesn’t do boring.

Until now.

For all his faults, Zimmer never fails to display an overwhelming command of sound, one endlessly engaging viewers aurally, for better or worse. The most frequently voiced qualms deal with Zimmer’s execution more so than the content produced, a dependence on bombast when subtlety would better complement the images at hand.

Which is why, after finally having viewed Frost/Nixon, I cannot fathom how Zimmer managed to infuse so much noise into such little sound.

Plucky, sleuth-like aural investigations are fitting for a Thomas Newman score — they’re even a trademark characteristic — but Zimmer? No. This was a film whose chief actor, Frank Langella, was lauded (rightly so) particularly for his incredible feats of voice acting. As such, this was also a film that rapidly established the superfluousness an involved film score would present.

Nondiagetic music barely utters a peep throughout Frost/Nixon, displaying its most overt gestures during the ending’s credit sequence. And while I’m tempted to compare Zimmer’s Frost/Nixon score to that of John Williams’s for Oliver Stone’s Nixon (1995), it would be unfair, if for no other reason than the difference in scope between the two films (i.e. the expansive nature of the latter, and the focused undertaking of the former).

That said, while Frost/Nixon’s modest employment of Zimmer’s minimalist score was in all likelihood for the best, they would have done better to altogether avoid contracting the most indulgent of film composers. What Frost/Nixon needed was someone who could shape one note into a blanket capable of engulfing the viewer in harrowed desolation. Instead, Zimmer hems 10 notes into a solitary, flat thud, both noncommittal and directionless.

A first for Zimmer, preferably a last.