Queen of Versailles (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

Jeff Beal | Format: MP3 Music

Product Details

• Original Release Date: July 3, 2012
• Label: Lakeshore Records
• Copyright: 2012 Lakeshore Records
• Total Length: 46:19
• Genres:
  • Soundtracks
• ASIN: B008C74SUG
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #180,651 Paid in MP3 Albums (See Top 100 Paid in MP3 Albums)

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

0 of 1 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars The Queen of Versailles August 8, 2012

By C. Loescher

Format:Audio CD

Composer Jeff Beal sure has one heck of an eclectic resume. The three-time Emmy winner (and eight-time nominee overall) has scored a huge host of film and television creations, including the critically-acclaimed Pollock and Appaloosa of the former and numerous works in the latter, most notably the USA network's Monk but also recent others such as Ugly Betty, the HBO series Carnivale and Rome, and the theme music to another USA hit, In Plain Sight. In listening to Beal's score for the documentary The Queen of Versailles, his compositional experience is easily evident, but unfortunately, fails to succinctly wrap the listener's attention beyond a select few salient points.

Magnolia Pictures' The Queen of Versailles follows a billionaire family along a journey beginning with the construction of America's largest home, at a paltry (!) 90,000 square feet. Due to economic downturns and the rapidly declining value of the dollar, however, the family's home morphs from a triumphant dream to a tumultuous and divisive reminder of the haphazard lifestyle of the United States' richest citizens. For a score accompanying what seems to be such a Kardashian motif based on synopsis alone, Jeff Beal has constructed a surprisingly robust collection of tunes here. The album begins with a very classical and baroque-sounding mixture of instrumentation, involved and roiling, but it's readily apparent that one of the score's problems is the extremely short length of the tracks. On the seventh track, "Time Share King," Beal begins to really show his talent for turning narrow corners inside a tightly-confined score, as a gentle piano grabs the listener's attention, just for a moment, before the next cues introduce a flitting harpsichord melody. "Miss America Gala" then brings the beginning and middle of the score full circle, as trumpets sound a tender yet whimsical announcement. The whole thing really reminds me of the scant work of Patrick Doyle on his score for Bridget Jones' Diary. It's then with standout tracks "Mr. & Mrs. Las Vegas" and "The Crash" that Beal lays out the melancholy, combining strings and piano with reverberating electronic pulses of percussion. Following "First Marriage, Tina" and "Humbled," which fondly recall Thomas Newman's American Beauty (albeit with far less wrenching gravity), however, Beal's score begins to lose steam. The last third of the album really does not engage the listener beyond a casual reminder of the album's first third, though the eight-minute conclusion "Waltz for Versailles (End Credits)" gives the listener pause right before ending on its own momentum.

At just over forty-six minutes, The Queen of Versailles is a long enough score to accompany a movie, and one might think that because Queen is a documentary, that length is duly sufficient and accomplishes its goal of guiding the film's plotlines. Based solely on its own emotional impact, however, Jeff Beal's The Queen of Versailles, while interesting at points in motif and instrumentation, is completely average in aggregate, and casually forgettable following its cessation. Here, Beal has created a suitable Renaissance-sounding score whose main issue is contiguity, rather than continuity.