Buy it... if you are among the group of Danny Elfman fans that enjoyed the quirky rhythms and unconventional instrumental usages in the composer's late 1990's efforts.

Avoid it... if an Elfman score that treads dangerously close to Thomas Newman territory (of the same era) doesn't fit your desire for thematic and harmonic resonance.

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A Civil Action: (Danny Elfman) Based on a true legal case, Jonathan Harr's story is translated to the big screen by director Steven Zaillian, who, after screenwriting Schindler's List, debuted at the helm with Searching for Bobby Fischer. With its outstanding cast, A Civil Action is a commentary about the overarching legal issues facing American society, and forges its message through one case (and its parties) in particular. It's less of a courtroom drama than it is the study of one attorney (played with only minimal success by John Travolta) and his transformation as his motivations and intentions change from those shaped by the legal industry to those shaped by the heart and soul. It's a redeeming, though still sobering examination of how badly average citizens are being screwed by big industry, and how the legal system often doesn't provide the satisfaction in resolving that issue. It's easy to see that composer Danny Elfman, replacing Ennio Morricone, looked at the project as one for which his music would address the soul of the picture rather than any larger issue. His scores of the late 1990's had mostly abandoned the fuller, Gothic nature of his earlier classics, and he was intent on writing either quirky scores that better suited his roots, or those that used non-traditional methods to achieve equally unconventional goals. While both tactics would serve him with Academy Award nominations in 1997, fans were still undecided about Elfman's direction when A Civil Action fulfilled the expectations of a certain zaniness, even in the face of a predominantly serious film about soul reflection.

Without a doubt, A Civil Action was a polarizing score at the time of its release, for it features Elfman trying so hard to provide an original sound for a character drama that he actually ends up being quite predictable. In his career, A Civil Action is the score that most closely resembles the artistic, rhythmic, and instrumental chaos of Thomas Newman during the same era. Newman's bizarre orchestrations and awkward movements were a hot commodity at the time, and Elfman strays very close to Newman's territory in parts of A Civil Action, all the while maintaining a substantial number of his own trademark styles. Even the film's handling of music is unconventional; the opening twenty minutes are absent any underscore, supporting the theory of Elfman's music identifying itself with internal resolution. Thematically, the score has two or three recurring ideas, but these identities are better established through the use of fragments of rhythm and instrumentation rather than a traditional harmonic progression. The instrumentation makes A Civil Action what it is, with an electric bass, Hammond organ, electric guitar, and gospel voices providing a touch of Southern flavor whereas the rest of the score features a marginal orchestral ensemble (usually led by light strings) with xylophones, a plethora of other light metallic percussion elements, and a surprising usage of glass. It's not clear how much of the eerie mid-tone sounds in A Civil Action are indeed the glass performances and how many are synthetic, but their influence on the cerebral tone of the score is significant.

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Also of particular note in the score is Elfman's handling of voices, which varies greatly throughout each cue. He uses them, by his own admission, like any other instrument, requiring a significant range of boy and adult choral performances sometimes as striking as the quick exhales of To Die For and, near the end, straying closer to the majesty of the more fluid performances in Edward Scissorhands. The gospel influence in the latter stages, over small band elements, is an enjoyably unique entry in Elfman's career. The staggered movements in A Civil Action reprise rhythmic usage in previous scores, including both Men in Black and Good Will Hunting, interestingly, with the score being most closely related to the latter effort in terms of Elfman's overall production. Each cue is like its own rhythmic experiment, sometimes exploding the pure chaos for the full ensemble; a cue like "Night Work," with its rampaging piano, is frightfully unlistenable. But the larger problem with A Civil Action is the fact that for all its creative meanderings, each somewhat interesting in their own way, the score has no cohesive soul itself. It's a score that really could have used some kind of thematic of larger rhythmic identity to make it more than simply a rambling collection of likeable, but rather predictable Elfman stream-of-consciousness stylings. For fans of Elfman's late 1990's experimentation, A Civil Action will be a very rewarding score with countless subtleties for you to admire. Otherwise, it surprisingly risks boredom. ***   Amazon.com Price Hunt: CD or Download

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For Danny Elfman reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.18 (in 61 reviews) and the average viewer rating is 3.17 (in 115,373 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.