The battles have a pro forma breathlessness, and Mr. Fraser's shaggy drollery provides a tone the director isn't quite up to.
And normally, I love film noir, but the big and operatic tone the director was clearly going for clashed with the mood of film noir, which is all about bittersweet cynicism.
She also personally disliked the "timey-wimey" devices, and commented that the "big and operatic tone the director was clearly going for clashed with the mood of film noir" and that the Angels "felt less menacing" and the "pace was a little too frantic".
Privately, however, composers grouse about a world in which competition is intense, fees are shrinking and often tone-deaf directors, producers and studio executives throw resources at special effects and movie stars while shorting the music.
There, she implied, in the subtle, final orchestrating of rhythm and tone, is where director and screenwriter meet and merge.
The tone befits a director who seven years ago at the Globe made a second problem play, "Measure For Measure," an exercise in mirth.
Skarsgård blamed both the media, for misrepresenting the tone of the director's remarks, and the Cannes festival organisers, for overreacting to the controversy.
This, ahem, cheeky arrival sets the tone for the director John Tiffany's playfully irreverent staging of this Euripides play, a tragedy that expresses in stark imagery the potentially gruesome consequences of irreverence.
And one of those singers, Charlene Carr as Maggie, who does not make it as one of the chosen eight, proves how tone deaf a director (Mark Bove as Zach) can be.
The movie has about it the same tone that its director and co-scriptwriter, Alexander Payne, brought to his bitter high-school comedy, Election, also set in Omaha, something you might call an unsentimental realism or a bracing misanthropy.
