‘Incarnate’ solid piece of work - Eckhart perfectly suits character

LOS ANGELES, Dec 2, (RTRS): When it comes to movies about demonic possession, the devil isn’t the only thing that’s in the details. It helps a lot if the filmmakers take a few intriguing detours while covering familiar territory, and it helps even more if you have a first-rate actor who’s totally committed to the lead role. (Sorry: Richard Burton’s hambone turn in “Exorcist II: The Heretic” doesn’t really count.) “Incarnate”, the latest offering from the Blumhouse house of horrors, offers a relatively fresh take on standard-issue exorcism-melodrama tropes, along with a performance by Aaron Eckhart that is more than persuasive enough to encourage the investment of a rooting interest. It may sound like damning with faint praise, but this briskly paced potboiler is better than it has any right to be.

Eckhart plays Dr Seth Ember, a scruffy, wheelchair-bound expeller of unclean spirits who insists that he performs “evictions,” not exorcisms, and claims that, unlike many in his chosen field, “I don’t clock in with the Vatican.” But on those rare occasions when holy water and crucifixes can’t do the trick, Catholic Church officials occasionally request Ember’s services as a subcontractor to beat the devil.

Employing a nondenominational methodology that suggests a William Peter Blatty-scripted remake of “Inception,” Ember aids demonically possessed unfortunates by “diving” into their dreams, where the victims are too busy enjoying deceptively wonderful interactions with loved ones (or smoking hot babes) to appreciate that they are in thrall to some minion of Satan. Director Brad Peyton and screenwriter Ronnie Christensen are proficient at establishing the ground rules for this gimmick, spelling out temporal limitations and escape-route necessities on the fly, and neatly tucking backstory into Ember’s dialogue exchanges with two dedicated assistants (Keir O’Donnell and Emily Jackson). A clever touch: When Ember is called upon to prove his expertise, he whips out his smartphone to present video documentation.

At the urging of a Vatican emissary (Catalina Sandino Moreno), Ember and his crew accept the challenge of freeing Cameron (David Mazouz of TV’s “Gotham”), an 11-year-old boy, from the grip of a demon with whom Ember has an old score to settle. The battle between relatively good and unspeakably evil unfolds sporadically in dream-world locations — a sunlit city park, a carnival midway — that provide effective visual contrasts to the usual exorcism-movie images of levitating and/or contorted bodies, inky-black eyes of demons, etc.

Eckhart spends much of “Incarnate” looking like something the cat dragged in, reconsidered, and tossed back outside, exuding a gone-to-seed, don’t-give-a-damn vibe that perfectly suits a character who claims to be more interested in exacting revenge than aiding innocents. (The aforementioned score-settling involves a demon responsible for the deaths of Ember’s wife and son, and his current paraplegic condition.) But wait, there’s more: An unexpectedly violent barroom encounter illustrates that Eckhart’s evictor may be the most intimidating physically challenged individual to appear on screen since a similarly gravelly voiced John Heard hobbled through “Cutter’s Way.”

Even at its comparatively short running time — scarcely 79 minutes before the closing credits — “Incarnate” isn’t quite fast enough to skate over a few distracting plot holes. (Los Angeles homicide detectives apparently turn the other way when the killer is a possessed child.) Overall, however, the film is a solid piece of work that should satisfy genre aficionados.

War-movie scores aren’t just military drums and brass bands anymore. The music is as much about the men as about the battle. That was made clear this year with Rupert Gregson-Williams’ music for “Hacksaw Ridge” and Alan Silvestri’s score for “Allied.”

“Hacksaw Ridge” director Mel Gibson tracked down English composer Gregson-Williams after hearing his work on this summer’s “The Legend of Tarzan” and offered him the film about Desmond Doss (Andrew Garfield), the pacifist combat medic who won a Medal of Honor for saving 75 lives during the Battle of Okinawa.

“We didn’t want to make him into a conventional action hero,” says Gregson-Williams. Instead, based on Doss’s religious convictions, he wrote a theme “that harks back to ancient religious harmonies ... something a little psalm-like. My idea was to keep it simple, because Desmond was not complex. I wanted to give him some faith without being pious.”

For the early home scenes in the Blue Ridge Mountains, he added a subtle touch of guitar (“to make us feel more rustic in a certain time and place rather than being specific to the Appalachians”). Gibson chose, however, to play the first 12 minutes of battle scenes without any music. “It’s just the realism of war,” the composer says.

Magic, wizarding, giants, strange creatures — fantasy always needs music to help us suspend disbelief and imagine new worlds.

This year, two of Hollywood’s most acclaimed composers tackled big special-effects fantasies: five-time Oscar winner John Williams, in his 27th film with director Steven Spielberg, “The BFG”; and eight-time Oscar nominee James Newton Howard, launching the new J.K. Rowling franchise “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them.”

“I loved doing it,” says Williams of “BFG”, “because it was a change from a lot of the things we’ve done. It was done with such feeling and such humanity that it represented a charming palette for me.”

For Williams, the orphan girl Sophie (Ruby Barnhill) and her adventure with a Big Friendly Giant (Mark Rylance) “was really an opportunity to compose and orchestrate a little children’s fantasy for orchestra.” He likened the experience to working on “Home Alone” 26 years ago, especially “the lightheartedness and fun of it. Even when scenes are threatening or ominous, we know that it’s not serious.”

Williams composed more than 90 minutes of music for an 85-piece L.A. orchestra, including especially virtuosic parts for the flute section.

“We tried to animate these little dreams that flit about the screen with flutes and harps and wispy harmonies,” the composer adds.

He praised the L.A. musicians as “world class” and was so inspired that he took the same ensemble over to UCLA’s Royce Hall a few months later and recorded an entire album of Spielberg movie themes, which Sony Classical will release next year.

“BFG” was based on a 1982 children’s novel by British writer Roald Dahl, whom Williams often encountered at the home of his friend and collaborator, director Robert Altman, in the late 1960s. “He seemed to be a tweedy, literary type,” Williams recalled, noting that he “had interest in music” and that they met not long before “Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory,” the 1971 musical version of his “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.”

Williams concedes that he had hoped for greater commercial success for “The BFG”, which was deemed a box-office disappointment after its July 1 release. His next film, however, won’t be: He begins recording “Star Wars Episode VIII” in December and expects to record off and on through March or April 2017.

To some degree, Howard is following in Williams’ musical footsteps with his ambitious and lengthy score for “Fantastic Beasts”, the spinoff franchise from the “Harry Potter” series (of which Williams scored the first three installments).

Howard even links the two series by reprising Williams’ “Hedwig’s Theme” at the start of the movie. After that, it hurtles off into its own new direction. Explains Howard: “My goal was to try and keep the bar high in terms of thematic legacy for these movies, which John had established so brilliantly. But it’s a new franchise, and I felt the music needed to stand on its own two feet.”

Stories involving magic invariably demand “pretty detailed and somewhat sophisticated orchestral writing,” Howard says. “You’re going to have a lot of woodwind and percussion flourishes, a certain chromaticism in terms of the melodic structures. Also choir and harps, and in my case, a fair amount of electronics as well.”

And a single theme won’t suffice. “The opportunities for really great thematic structure were so great in this movie. Once I felt that I had the themes, and David (director Yates) was happy and it was all working, then it becomes a massive architectural project, telling the story.”

There is an opening fanfare (which Howard says was written quite late in the process and will be exploited more in the next film), a mystery-filled “Fantastic Beasts” theme, two themes for Eddie Redmayne’s eccentric Newt (one somewhat lighthearted — “Newt can be quite a Chaplinesque character” — and another more heroic) and several secondary motifs representing supporting characters and creatures.

There are also grand setpieces, as we discover what’s inside Newt’s suitcase and for some of the large-scale creature scenes. The sheer variety of music required, from waltzes to marches to romantic music, “is what appealed to me the most. It was the broadest musical spectrum one could imagine.”

Augmenting his 94-piece London orchestra were a 40-voice choir and the 20-voice Trinity Boys Choir; an early-music consort including baroque cello and viola da gamba; and a small jazz combo for Howard’s colorful ‘20-style jazz (part ragtime, part Dixie) featuring fun clarinet solos, muted trumpets and stride piano.

Howard spent seven months on the score, including three in London working closely with Yates. “There was a lot of experimentation and rewriting,” he reports, adding, “I think I worked as hard on this score as anything I’ve ever done.” The final tally was two hours and 10 minutes of music, among Howard’s longest-ever scores.

The composer is planning a first-ever European tour next year after he scores the “Jumanji” remake and adapts Tchaikovsky for “The Nutcracker and the Four Realms.” He’s already been asked to score the second “Fantastic Beasts” film in 2018.