Buy it... if you might enjoy a touch of elegance, a dash of adventure, and a heavy dose of sentiment from Jerry Goldsmith at his romantic best.

Avoid it... if the few moments of soaring adventure in the score's secondary flying theme don't hold your interest during the score's significantly mellow majority.

Goldsmith

Forever Young: (Jerry Goldsmith) Both poetic and coated with about as much sugar as humanly possible, Forever Young is a fantasy love story that goes so far with its exploits of romanticism that it even throws in some 1930's locale and soaring propeller airplanes. The film was immediately recognized for what it was by audiences and critic alike: a light-duty escape for mostly women to shed a tear over while their boyfriends or husbands glance around for the nearest exit or beer. After his 30's love interest is put into a coma by an accident, a test pilot played by Mel Gibson, with nothing left worth living for, decides to rely on his best friend, a scientist played by George Wendt. Rather than simply killing himself (where would be the fun in that movie?), the scientist freezes the pilot in an experimental cryogenics device that had been successfully tested on a chicken. Circumstances cause the pilot to remain frozen for over 50 years, mostly undisturbed in his capsule, before a pair of kids accidentally thaws him out while playing in an old military storage depot. The film then follows the tender relationship between the pilot and the two boys as well some sweetness between Gibson and Jamie Lee Curtis before the inevitable search for the now-elderly and recovered lover yields predictable results. A film like Forever Young relies heavily upon its score to create the right atmosphere for its love story (especially for the 30's settings), although in this particular case we have the need for some whimsical flying music as well. Director Steve Miner refers to composer Jerry Goldsmith as a "godsend" for the film. It's is the kind of project very typical of Goldsmith's emphasis in the early 1990's, with love themes in the concurrent Medicine Man and Mr. Baseball leading to a similar flow of emotion in Forever Young. A touch of elegance, a dash of adventure, and a heavy dose of sentiment are the recipe once again, and Forever Young remains one of the better results of the composer's output during this period.

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For collectors who keep the Forever Young album tucked someplace accessible on their CD shelves, the main enticement is the love theme for the film. With the same attraction of the overblown Rent-A-Cop theme and the instrumental ease that prevails in Powder and other soft ventures, the Forever Young love theme has a timeless quality and an innocence of heart that we would never really hear again from Goldsmith. This project would arguably be the composer's last (and few, overall) attempt to score a film with only beauty and romantic lyricism at heart. The Brad Dechter soprano sax arrangement of this theme at the start of the album is a mushy extension of Goldsmith's original version incorporated into the final cue of John Barry proportions, and the theme is appropriately downplayed in the middle portion of the score. Rearrangement of the cue order for the album does allow a few of the piano and solo woodwind performances of that theme to be scattered throughout that album. For fans of Goldsmith's more ambitious and adventuresome music, however, Forever Young holds two or three cues that will interest you. The secondary theme for the film is one for the flying sequences, and Goldsmith opens the film with the highlight "Test Flight" cue. Driven by a Basil Poledouris-like electronic bass pulse, the soaring brass theme for French horns, punctuated by exciting hits by the full ensemble, is accompanied by string performances of the theme that faintly (but appropriately) resembles John Williams' Superman love theme. As the pilot teaches one of the boys in the future how to fly a plane on his cardboard cutout of a cockpit in "Tree House," Goldsmith skillfully repeats the "Test Flight" cue as a ghostly version of itself. A slight tingling of Goldsmith's electronics would lend a hint of magic to that scene and a handful of others. While some of the same rhythmic exuberance would accompany the flying scenes at the end of the film, the sentimentality of the impending reunion would water down the pulsing bass and snare with uncertainty on a solo piano. Overall, Forever Young is an above-average Goldsmith work, albeit one at the much fluffier end of the fantasy scale. The 1992 album is completely out of print, although it contains a satisfying 35 minutes of Goldsmith music and a Billie Holiday source song at the end. A recommended lightweight for any Goldsmith collector. ***

Bias Check:

For Jerry Goldsmith reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.22 (in 111 reviews) and the average viewer rating is 3.36 (in 120,002 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.