Filmtracks Recommends:
Buy it... if you love the logic-defying spirit of adventure in the film, a reflection of which is heard in Dave Grusin's haphazard, genre-defying score. Avoid it... if a poorly conceived combination of John Williams, Jerry Goldsmith, and Max Steiner sensibilities in music that was butchered upon editing into the film doesn't appeal to your quest for highly cohesive fantasy music of convincing depth. Filmtracks Editorial Review:
The Goonies: (Dave Grusin) Director Steven Spielberg made a reputation out of conjuring stories about children's interaction and family challenges and developing them into highly manipulative movies. Some of these productions were aimed at the fears of adults while others were purely meant as entertainment suitable for the youngsters themselves. Among the last of the latter category for Spielberg was 1985's The Goonies, one of Amblin Entertainment's early projects and one what combined Spielberg's writing and production talents with an all-star crew that included director Richard Donner and screenwriter Chris Columbus. Despite the scope of the latter two's involvement, The Goonies had a distinctly Spielberg touch on screen that led many to believe, as with Poltergeist a few years earlier, that he had influenced the direction of the film more than officially credited. The story required that logic be left at the door, telling of a group of kids (the "Goonies") in mystical (though actually just perpetually dreary) Astoria, Oregon whose parents are all facing foreclosure on their homes. On one last adventure together, they decide to seek out fabled treasure said to exist underground in the area, and their path to the discovery of the pristine pirate ship in hidden caves is inhibited only by a series of physical obstacles (a usual Spielberg favorite) and a family of bumbling criminals (a Columbus trademark). Along with the scenes of innocent adolescent romance, the closing scene of The Goonies is so ridiculously contrived that it's difficult to forgive the entire movie. At least Spielberg created waves by allowing the young cast to swear freely, an aspect of the film that drew some fire despite its realistic depiction of banter in that age group. Considering a heavy marketing campaign that included a Spielberg-directed MTV video with Cyndi Lauper, though, The Goonies was a relative disappointment. It failed to earn universally positive praise and lagged far behind its Amblin production sibling, Gremlins, at the box office. Still, The Goonies managed to achieve a tremendous cult following with viewers who were the pre-teen age of the protagonists in the story at the time of its theatrical release, and considerable momentum for the film generated twenty years later has long reaffirmed Donner and Spielberg's interest in someday revisiting the concept in a sequel (or, intriguingly, a Broadway musical). In the early days of Amblin, composers John Williams and Jerry Goldsmith were the regular Spielberg collaborators, and only in the mid-1980's did he begin to branch out to explore the talents of others writing in the industry. One such diversion from the norm was the hiring of Dave Grusin for The Goonies, and the composer's natural first instinct was to be surprised that he was offered the job at all. Grusin, despite being active in film scoring for over a decade, was better known for his contemporary jazz contributions and the very successful record label that was spawned from those efforts. He had written serious orchestral scores before, though even in Hollywood, he was frequently associated with soundtracks like Tootsie (and related songs). But his connection to Spielberg went back to an obscure student project of the director in 1971, and he was thus thrust into an almost impossible position of conjuring a score that could compete with the style of Williams and Goldsmith, both of whom were arguably at their peak at the time. In retrospect, one must wonder whether or not Grusin was biting off more than he could chew with The Goonies. Spielberg, as usual, was omnipresent in the scoring process, from the conceptual stage all the way through the inevitable heavy rearrangement of the music in the finished picture. Perhaps it should come as no surprise that the score Grusin submitted is an awkward blend of influences from Williams, Goldsmith, and Max Steiner, with only a hint of his contemporary mannerisms figuring mostly into the end credits cue. The Steiner presence is somewhat appropriate but bizarre in this context; quotations from the 1948 score for The Adventures of Don Juan are brazenly incorporated into a climactic fight sequence and are jarringly disparate from the remainder of the score. The Williams influence comes in the form of the motif development and Grusin's general attempts to translate the vintage swashbuckling sound into the dynamic bombast expected during the 1980's. More interestingly, the touch of Goldsmith in The Goonies exists in the form of the employment of synthesizers as an additional section of the orchestra. You can definitely hear Grusin attempt to take Goldsmith's usual instrumentation at the time and force it into a Williams mould. To an extent, this tactic works, but it's obvious from Spielberg's requests for extensive re-writes and the eventual heavy rearrangement of the cues in the picture (both of which making it very difficult to match what you hear on screen with what you hear on album) that Grusin didn't manage to accomplish the impossible. In its general grasp of the adventure in the plot, Grusin's score functions. He tends to draw too many similarities to Carl Stalling's Warner Bothers cartoon music, but he does manipulate that sound into a broader environment of 80's fantasy scores. Unfortunately, the organization of the score seems haphazard and there is a lack of sweeping majesty of convincing depth in the thematic structures and disappointingly sparse orchestrations. In places, it sounds like a demo take on what Goldsmith or Williams would follow with additional layers of activity. Grusin's four major themes for the film never gain much traction, regardless of their unintended placements in the film. The main identity for the Goonies as a group is pleasantly harmonic in a vaguely noble sense, ironically best arranged in the pop-inspired "End Titles." A theme for One-Eyed Willie the pirate and the lead boy inspired to seek his treasure is a competent mystery theme but fails to generate any gravity. The oddly well-preserved pirate ship is afforded its own theme, one which attempts to address the true fantasy element, but this idea ultimately blends badly with the Steiner material and loses credibility by its accompaniment of the ship's ridiculous escape from the coast in "No Firme and Pirate Ship." Finally, the comically rhythmic symphonic theme of classical influence for the Fratelli family of criminals is perhaps the best remembered idea from the score, but it cheapens the remainder of Grusin's material (especially with its strange merging of the symphonic performances and drum pads and light metallic loops). Without any of the themes jumping forth and taking command of the score, The Goonies risks becoming generic outside of its rather unique instrumental balance, and without many truly consistent, compelling performances of the four themes, the score wanders without the ability to tell its own narrative tale. Perhaps it was not meant to, as the use of the Steiner and Williams' Superman theme in parody fashion would suggest in "The Fighting Fratellis." A likeable overarching character is the best rebuttal to these concerns with The Goonies, and those who worship the film and accept its faults will find much to appreciate in Grusin's music. The score was not treated well on Epic's original LP and CD releases, both of which only included Grusin's "End Titles" to accompany the songs by Lauper and others. After years of seeing bootlegs of the score, Varèse Sarabande finally responded with a whopping 79-minute Club release of 5,000 copies that sold out within months of its 2010 debut. Given the cult appeal of the film, that sales performance is not surprising, though for those not interested in or impressed by the movie, the merely functional score is a mixed bag of conflicting styles and thematic ambiguity despite its adventuresome personality. *** Track Listings:
Total Time: 79:08
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