Buy it... if you seek the best combination of Danny Elfman's early 1990's melodrama and late 1990's percussive and acoustic styles, a rare blend that Elfman achieved only once in a decade.

Avoid it... if you expect the beautiful choral and thematic reminders of Edward Scissorhands and Sommersby to last for longer than ten combined minutes on an album that remains a rare collectible.

Elfman

The Family Man: (Danny Elfman) Among the many films to explore the possibilities of choice through an alternate universe, Brett Ratner's Christmas 2000 release The Family Man was a predictable entry. Successful in life but having lost his soul, Nicolas Cage's character is given an opportunity by an angel to view how his life could have been different if he had married his college girlfriend and been a poor family man. He is immediately horrified by the lack of wealth, but eventually realizes the importance of the less tangible elements and becomes a changed man. The Family Man underperformed at the box office for Universal Pictures, and among the casualties of this failure was a proper album treatment for Danny Elfman's heartfelt score for the film. Having spent much of 2000 away from the spotlight after resurrecting a fervor of interest in his career with 1999's Sleepy Hollow, Elfman and his music had elevated expectations in 2000, expectations not met with the lackluster Proof of Life. The lack of a commercial album for The Family Man has largely guided the discussion about the score, making desperate seekers out of fans who had longed for Elfman to return to the style of melancholy beauty that had defined his early career. It was only a matter of time, some would say, before Danny Elfman would once again receive an assignment for which he would write eloquent music for a mystical fantasy film. The common complaint of fans of Elfman's music from the early 1990's, of course, was that he had abandoned his original orchestral tendency towards overwhelmingly dark and emotional music of a grand scale. Part of this transformation in Elfman's career was due to a voluntary path of maturing tastes for the composer; he had been accepting jobs that entailed working for films that really didn't call for that particular tone and scope of music. With The Family Man, however, Elfman was once again presented with a magical story dealing with deep character issues, and he responded by tapping that early melodramatic sound and infusing it into the modern sensibilities that had dominated his late-90's works.

The commercial album for the film sold moderately well, though the extent of Elfman's music on that product is restricted to only about six minutes. The studio was pushing hard for the Seal song from the film, "This Could Be Heaven," to be awarded with an Academy Award nomination, likewise pushing Elfman's score as part of a dual campaign for recognition. A promotional "for your consideration" album of The Family Man was filtered to AMPAS members in January of 2001, containing both the Seal song and a full expansion of Elfman's score. The song is decent, and stood an outside chance of a nomination, but whether or not you can tolerate the song depends on how much you enjoy Seal's distinct voice. The Elfman score, on the other hand, is exactly what a large number of his fans wanted to hear: a significant, though partial return to the fully orchestral and choral majesty of his efforts of the early 1990's. A fully realized theme of lament dominates the half dozen most appealing cues. Often performed on solo woodwind or a piano with string accompaniment, the theme is a delicate and wondrous one. It inspires enough awe and beauty to revive thoughts of his darker, gothic scores, but it never quite reaches the same powerful level of despair and melancholy as many of the depressing themes (as some would call them) from those older scores. The rolling lower woodwind and acoustic guitar performances that blessed Sommersby do make an appearance early in the score. But instead of dwelling in sadness as we all know Elfman enjoys doing, the score for The Family Man has a child-like spark of energy and optimism that fits well with the holiday spirit of the film. The score doesn't become enveloped in the holidays like Scrooged, for instance, but The Family Man does offer a more balanced and conservative approach with the percussion that normally symbolizes the time of year. The "Main Titles" cue, one of the two tracks available on the commercial album, features perhaps the most energetic and enthusiastic performance of the Christmas spirit, full of prancing strings, ringing chimes and bells, and jingling tambourines.

Because the promotional album does not name its tracks, the analysis of the score that follows will reference track numbers rather than cue titles. The fourth track (immediately following "Main Titles") introduces the light children's choir that Elfman made famous with Edward Scissorhands, and its lofty and sensitive performance here is no different in its mix. After a solid first four tracks of score (during which its thematic material is well established), the next ten short cues offer a more jumbled mix of a partial orchestra and Elfman's electronic and solo expressions of Instinct and Good Will Hunting. There are only a few cues of high volume in this midsection of Elfman's score, and the choppy one-minute tracks feature little to get excited about, with quietly meandering underscore occasionally yielding to a strike of electronic drums. The eighteenth track of score, however, introduces the fantastic conclusion of the album. Of the last ten cues, only the twenty-fourth track, "Promise," was made available on the commercial album. That superior cue includes one of the more gothic and haunting performances of theme, resounding with the same classical string development as Black Beauty. The two tracks that will be of most interest to Elfman enthusiasts, though, are not on the commercial album. The twenty-third track features a remarkably beautiful performance of the title theme by a single flute sonically silhouetted against the light choir. The five-minute cue eventually culminates into a similar performance with the woodwinds and choir joined by full strings and the piano. The final score track is the gem of the promo album. After the previous, startling track of electronic percussion (much like Good Will Hunting), the final, five-minute conclusion provides the fully matured rendition of the title theme. The orchestra builds in momentum for three minutes before unleashing the theme with the full grandeur of the finale from Edward Scissorhands. It was the best single Elfman cue since early in the decade, and it will simply knock the socks off of any collector of the composer's works.

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On the whole, The Family Man has its highlights, and because of the highly contemplative nature of its middle portions, as well as a few startling explosions of drum pads and other electronic elements in the fifth and twenty-sixth cues, it isn't a completely consistent listening experience. In terms of tone, because the score and its primary theme are constructed with more major key progressions than Elfman traditionally used for such scores as Edward Scissorhands and Sommersby, it doesn't really produce the same depressing result. Sure, there are openly bittersweet elements, but the theme for The Family Man exquisitely takes flight with an overwhelming sense of optimism and charm, evident in greater degrees as the score progresses. In retrospect, the score is truly the best combination of all of Elfman's styles of the 1990's rolled into one product. Unfortunately, the composer wouldn't engage in the same wholesale, emotional melodrama to a matching extent in the 2000's, only touching briefly on the style in Charlotte's Web (which is, along with The Family Man, among the composer's best efforts of the decade). The promotional album originally sold for hundreds of dollars on the secondary market, though it didn't take long before bootlegs of that CD began to filter out without the Seal song. An isolated score track on the DVD release of the film increased these bootlegs in quantity. Your decision on whether or not to pursue the score depends on your loyalty to the strongly poetic side of Elfman's early works. And even though the full score was already presented on the promo album before the subsequent bootlegs, only 20 or so minutes of it comprise the beautiful cues that demand repeat enjoyment. The other half of the score is still listenable, representing the aforementioned, healthy and enjoyable combination of Elfman's older orchestral styles and his newer, electronically percussive ones. In the end, though, the spirit of the score for The Family Man marked a stunning comeback for Elfman's emotionally dramatic half, with five to ten minutes of simply unforgettable magic. For these moments alone, the score can be classified among the best of 2000. ****   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.