by Lancelot on 10/21/2001
 
An ecclectic album, to be certain, but it all fits together as a listening experience. Though the overall score is Hans Zimmer's, the opening and closing tracks are not his, but rather "mood" tracks that help frame the enclosed score. The opening track, "Subway Drums," is a source music cue, taken from the on-screen performance of the bucket-drummer (perhaps you recall him from the button-jeans commercial). In the movie, Green Card, the two main characters meet each other briefly in a coffee house called "Afrika." The subtext of "having met in Afrika" and the supposedly "exotic" nature of their faux-relationship is played extremely well throughout the score, with a rhythmic main theme that recurs enough to be unifying, but never to the point of exhaustion.

Zimmer has always mastered an ethnic-sound to his scores, that is evidenced particularly well in his work on The Power of One, and The Lion King, two of his more African-themed scores. Green Card applies that sound, but harnesses it with a lighter, romantic/comedic aspect.

Though not to dismiss the score as comedic fluff, there are moment of pensive drama and romance. The story explains that Gerard Depardieu's character is passed off as an important composer, hard at work on a new ballet... this as a point to explain the presence of Mr. Depardieu's briefly noticible humming on one of the slower tracks, as his character is inspired to compose a new love theme (drawn a slower segment of the main theme heard earlier in the score). Here much of the score turns to the piano. Also enclosed in the score is a Mozart concerto which divides and compliments the score quite nicely. The closing track, "Eyes on the Prize," is a reaffirming gospel choir piece, the message of which is understood better through the movie, perhaps, but overall, it does not harm the album.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this score is the "inverted arc" the score follows, rather than starting at a low point, the music starts at a high point, and towards the middle begins to mellow, before rising again to close at a high point. This makes the album on the whole, a teriffic listening experience that is never too jarring or unsatisfying.