Filmtracks Recommends:
Buy it... on the bootleg only if you maintain a complete collection of Hans Zimmer's scores and are, for some odd reason, not satisfied with the adequately lengthy suite on the commercial album. Avoid it... if you expected to hear an intelligent, well-developed suspense score that combines America's pastime with terrifying, obsessive emotions. Filmtracks Editorial Review:
The Fan: (Hans Zimmer/Jeff Rona) This combination of film and score is easily a disaster for most viewers and listeners, and if you just happen to be a baseball fan, then you'd be better off ignoring it all together. Based on the novel by Peter Abrahams, Phoef Sutton's screenplay must have seemed like a good idea to the Crimson Tide duo of director Tony Scott and composer Hans Zimmer. The story revolves around a man beaten by society (Robert De Niro) who is a devoted fan of the San Francisco Giants baseball team. As he loses his job and all perspective on life, he becomes more and more obsessed with the Giants' newest acquisition, played by Wesley Snipes (clearly modeled after the real-life Giants' 1993 acquisition of pre-steroids superstar Barry Bonds), and the fan will do anything it takes to have him lead the Giants to the World Series. For film score collectors and baseball fans alike, The Fan will make you pull your hair out. Despite a notable performance by De Niro, Scott and Zimmer both fail in their jobs so miserably that the resulting film is nearly laughable. Then again, as a cynic would say, what do you expect from a British director and a German composer attempting to set a film in the context of America's pastime? Before whipping Zimmer for making the situation worse, let's take a swing at the film itself. Scott emphasized that The Fan is not a baseball movie, and yet, the baseball scenes are so incorrect that you can't help but throw a tomato at the screen. How can you concentrate on the movie's plot when the players' uniforms change in every shot, the Giants' opponents change in every inning, players argue over a Giants number (#11) that is retired, umpires are murdered and replaced by the killer in the middle of the game, players don't get loose in the on-deck circle, the scoreboard jumbotron shows live images during a pitch, games are played in a torrential downpour, and Candlestick Park is hosting a baseball game while configured for a 49ers football game? Heck, the mishandling of Candlestick Park alone (interior shots of Coors Field and Dodger Stadium are substituted at will) makes the film ludicrous. And Cal Ripkin, Jr., was a technical adviser for this disgrace? He should be whipped, too. It is understandable that Hans Zimmer's music isn't the stereotypical baseball score. The story is one of emotional disintegration and murder, not one of inspirational teamwork. But Zimmer completely ignores (or is ignorant of) the context of baseball as a game, and the feeling of rejuvenation that the start of a season raises. His charged, guitar-driven music pounds at deafening levels, and combined with songs from Nine Inch Nails and other heavy metal selections, it drowns out dialogue and replaces the spirit of the baseball setting with one of militaristic force (or at least football; perhaps Zimmer was unfamiliar with George Carlin's famous skit). Even when the composer utilizes his synthetic-sounding strings for dramatic effect, the score is brutally overplayed. No dominant theme is clearly evident, nor is there an established motif that develops into terrifying chaos as the film progresses and the obsessed fan murders players and umpires. No progression from good to evil is experienced over the course of the score's play, which is surprising given the very obvious and relentless path towards personal destruction on screen. The primary theme is a series of descending two-note figures that utilizes upbeat electronics far too similar to The Preacher's Wife and Toys. A secondary cello theme grasps at the melodrama and despair of the primary character, but it is largely orphaned by the rest of the score. The cello's performance isn't particularly compelling in its emphasis of key notes and the recording of the instrument is too low in the soundscape to compete effectively with surrounding material. A heartbeat effect in the base region during several cues is a bit annoying in its pull from the barrel of sports genre cliches. The ambience is largely synthesized, which is a poor choice given that the baseball setting is one of tradition, begging for the same emotional environment to be produced by a real orchestra. There is dark side to the game that could be explored if you begin with the style of The Natural or For the Love of the Game (although composed after The Fan) and convincingly mutate it from its Americana roots and place it at the mercy of electronics. That would have made this music exquisite. Instead, Zimmer produces an adequate, though badly misplaced suspense score that accomplishes nothing more than a brooding sense of mood, dropping style for faceless ambience that barely touches upon the character motivations in the film and ignores context. The lack of creativity by Zimmer is compounded by the same kind of general tone that was heard in The House of the Spirits, which, when layered with an extra dose of weighty string melodrama, becomes tedious and ridiculous. The scenes of actual play on the baseball field are comical in their use of music; Zimmer and whomever the dolt is who decided upon the song use in the picture haven't a clue as to what kind of music you really hear at baseball games. More than in any of his other scores, Zimmer seemed asleep at the wheel, and if this exact music wasn't the demand of Scott, then the composer obviously took the lazy path here. A series of thumping minor third performances on electric bass (or an equivalent bottom dweller) for many of the suspense scenes is the ultimate in "easy road" philosophy. If Scott and Zimmer had been on the ball, they could have consulted with Blake Edwards' Experiment in Terror, a 1962 thriller in which the murderer is killed on the pitching mound of Candlestick Park during a Giants game. In that film, the combined silence during scenes of mad chasing through the crowd and an orchestral burst of energy at the end perfectly captured the spirit of the horror genre and placed it in the baseball setting. But what can you expect from a trashy, modern thriller in which real-life player John Kruk (a huge man even in his playing days) dies from a stab wound to the shoulder during a game? Stupidity in this film is rampant, and Zimmer's music did nothing to attempt to solve the situation, whether by his own lack of homework on the subject or by the directives of the film's producers. The score plays poorly in the film, and 20 minutes of it, along with several of the songs that were also out of place in the picture, were provided on a commercial album at the time of the film's 1996 release. Parts of Zimmer's one lengthy suite on the commercial product fit remarkably well with the heavy metal songs, not to mention The Peacemaker and other similar scores of the era for the composer. As to be expected, more selections from the score became available on the bootleg market, courtesy of the plethora of die-hard Zimmer collectors (most of whom dismiss all legitimate questions about the appropriateness of this score and simply accept it at face value). Originally, a ten-track, 45-minute score album was released that contained music that wasn't formatted for the commercial album. Some of this material featured a few snippets of dialogue from the film, including the "Fan Poem" performed by De Niro. That particular recording is alone a perfect example of how Zimmer missed the mark in this score; the poem itself is so redemptive on one side and so creepy on the other, and Zimmer does absolutely nothing to address either emotional requirement in that otherwise blindly pleasant piece (which exists without the dialogue in the lengthy suite). Later, another bootleg surfaced that combined the ten cues from the first bootleg with the two Zimmer-composed tracks from the commercial album (one being the score suite and the other being a song that Zimmer composed for the project). Two similar variations, with different track orders, exist of this bootleg. Among all of Zimmer's scores to be passed around the secondary market in this form, The Fan is probably the most unnecessary, with the most notable material pressed on the commercial album and the bootlegs often varying wildly in sound quality from track to track. Even if you completely forget the rotten film and the fact that Zimmer failed in every regard to put his score in context, the music isn't a very interesting listening experience on album. It doesn't have the dramatic weight of his later scores in the same genre, nor does it exhibit the same consistently rhythmic action music heard in the previous year's Crimson Tide. Those who claim that the music succeeds in addressing the turmoil in the De Niro character's head are resigning themselves to mediocrity when so much potential existed for a more intelligently devious score. It's a frustrating case all around. Perhaps all could have been forgiven if the filmmakers had included, along with the 3,000 extras and 10,000 cut-outs, Candlestick Park's best known night game inhabitants: drunk naked guys running around the ring of the upper deck in 40-degree weather carrying ice cream cones. But how would Zimmer have scored that? * Track Listings (Commercial Album:):
Total Time: 68:50
* song written by Hans Zimmer Track Listings (Bootleg #1, HZCD 010LR):
Total Time: 31:28
Track Listings (Bootleg #2, Variation #1, HZCD 013LR):
Total Time: 46:87
Track Listings (Bootleg #2, Variation #2, HZCD 013LR):
Total Time: 70:40
All artwork and sound clips from The Fan are Copyright © 1996, 1997, TVT Soundtrax, Bootlegs. The reviews and notes contained on the filmtracks.com site may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the prior written authority of Filmtracks Publications. Audio clips can be heard using RealPlayer but cannot be redistributed without the label's expressed written consent. Page created 10/16/03, updated 4/7/09. Review Version 4.1 - PHP (Filmtracks Publications). Copyright © 2003-2013, Christian Clemmensen. All rights reserved. |
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