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Bobby Jones: Stroke of Genius: (James Horner) After
producing four scores all for release in the last two months of 2003, James
Horner continues his fast pace of writing with both his replacement score
for
Troy and a his heartfelt work for
Bobby Jones: Stroke of
Genius, both of which released on album on the same day in May, 2004.
The story of
Bobby Jones could seem like 120 minutes of Hell if
you're not enthusiastic about golf and its history. Robert Tyre Jones, Jr.
remains the one and only person to have ever won the title of Grand Slam
Champion by winning the British Amateur, the British Open, the U.S. Open,
and the U.S. Amateur, all in 1930. Having done so at age 28, the film serves
as a biography of Jones' life up to and including that golfing record. It's
a no-thrills detailing of Jones' sickly childhood, his 'miracle' year of
performance on the golf courses of Scotland and America, and his ultimate
decision to retire early to spend time with his family. The film was pounded
by critics for being a boring depiction about an event that few people
really care about, with poor performances (led by Jim Caviezel fresh from
his suffering portrayal of Jesus in
The Passion of the Christ) and
sappy, unoriginal photography of golf courses. If you go through the rather
stark history of golfing films (
Tin Cup,
Caddyshack,
The
Legend of Bagger Vance, etc), there really is a limit to the originality
with which you can make an interesting dramatic film about golf and, more
specifically, one golfer. This problem extends to the original scores for
these films, although Rachel Portman managed to strike one very popular,
magical exception with
The Legend of Bagger Vance a few years ago.
Since the meat of the
Bobby Jones film is based in Scotland, the
producers of the film sought the services of James Horner in order to
reinvent his own wildly popular score for
Braveheart in a more
personalized fashion. It is a score that Horner could write in his sleep,
and, in most parts, it sounds like he just may have been asleep at the wheel
while writing it.
The film doesn't necessary demand much of Horner. The
emotional depth of the film could have been greater had the filmmaking been
of better quality, but as it stands, a very normal Horner string score would
suffice at every turn. Despite a press release and a few fanatical Horner
collectors' assertions that
Bobby Jones is a "magical" score, it's
evident that less magic went into this score than went into
Field of
Dreams, which remains an important sports and family-related score in
Horner's career. The largely string score for
Bobby Jones has
lyricism and harmony pleasant enough to lull the listener to a gentle
snooze, with a repetitive theme that experiences several similar variations
throughout the score. Horner has produced so many of these string themes
since the early 1990's that it becomes difficult to pinpoint which one of
them that
Bobby Jones resembles (and maybe that's a startling and
dangerous point). Heavy layering of these string swells in "Destined for
Greatness" is the sole highlight of the score. A solo horn announces the
vistas of the golf courses in solemn tributes to the game in a few cues. A
distant solo drum beat can often be heard, perhaps hushing the orchestra in
the same funny manner that golf announcers always whisper into the
microphone. More important are half a dozen bursts of Scottish flavor with
Uilleann pipes, guitars, and ethnic woodwinds that pick up the rhythm and
serve to represent the Scottish golfing locations. The themes for
Bobby
Jones are all so mundane and pleasant (and lengthy in their slow
performances) that you don't leave this score with a tune in your head.
Rather, a soft and cozy emotional impression is left, without a single
darker moment to spoil the mood. It's difficult to recommend this score to
anyone who already has a healthy dose of Horner on his/her shelves,
especially with the superior (but also flawed) score for
Troy
released concurrently. The album for
Bobby Jones presents an
overly-generous 60+ minutes of a score that could have easily sufficed with
a 45 minute release. Horner seems to be sinking further and further into his
own abyss of self-regurgitation, and unless he can take a sub-average film
like
Bobby Jones and let loose with a highly original, truly magical
work, then he risks losing a considerable number of even his most loyal
fans. Unless you have a special place in your heart for
Bobby Jones
as a film, then skip this score in favor of one of Horner's other, more
interesting variants on the style.
**
| Bias Check: | For James Horner reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating
is 3.12 (in 89 reviews)
and the average viewer rating is 3.34
(in 158,767 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.
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The insert includes a list of performers, but no extra information about the score or film.
