Buy it... if you were among those who easily adapted to enjoy Danny Elfman's more complicated mannerisms of the late 1990's, for Instinct, while featuring some connections to the composer's early days, is structured much like his other scores of the later era.

Avoid it... if you require Elfman (or any composer, for that matter) to provide a strong and obvious overarching structure to his scores.

Elfman

Instinct: (Danny Elfman) The much-anticipated 1999 drama Instinct was an exhibition of two actors at the top of their game. The performances of Anthony Hopkins as a professor gone mad and Cuba Gooding Jr. as the psychiatrist attempting to straighten him out eclipse all else in Jon Turteltaub's film. Unfortunately, Turteltaub's career had been made up of relatively lightweight projects, and too many of Instinct's plot devices were too familiar for the story to be compelling on its own merits. Hopkins' character travels to Africa to study gorillas and, during a span of two years that he's gone missing, he's lost his mind. After brutally killing two men and being captured, he is returned to America to face trial and rehabilitation. The film alternates between tense scenes with the two leads and flashback sequences to fill in the narrative. Composer Danny Elfman had reportedly traveled to Africa himself before tackling Instinct (becoming quite ill in the process), and this assignment represented yet another journey in a new direction for the popular composer. His career changed significantly when he entered his 40's, leaving behind the orchestral majesty of his early assignments and turning to dramas like A Simple Plan, A Civil Action, and Instinct to explore less fantastic realms of composition. His work of the late 1990's is often shunned by the mainstream, though it maintains a faithful following amongst the composer's most ardent collectors. Instinct really is a score that polarized those fans, for it attempted to merge some elements of the composer's early style with the mannerisms of his maturing one. Nothing about Instinct is really straightforward, requiring an appreciation of the layering of motifs that Elfman typically employed at the time. There are themes, but they're obscured. There is harmony, but it's laced with incongruous ideas in the background. There is beauty in Elfman's standard light choir, but it's countered by synthetic bass and percussion. There is an overarching style, but it exists in tone rather than structure. When you put all of this together, you get a score that is distinctly Elfman's, but one that has a tendency to either truly engage the listener or leave him cold. Few agreements are to be found with Instinct, not because it is non-functional, but because it is as elusive as the crazed mind at the center of the film.

The primary theme of the film is a "freedom motif" that is utilized with great effect in "Everybody Goes" and "Escape." This theme, which appears most prominently halfway through the former cue and at the conclusion of the latter, is remarkably powerful. But it is also dressed with several lines of independent instrumentation, obscuring its performances despite exuding the proper overall emotional impact. The layering effect is something that Elfman became fond of using in this period in his career. The days of simply presenting a theme and giving it the full attention of nearly the entire ensemble were over. Instead, brass performances (which were rare at the time for Elfman) of the title theme are accompanied by meandering woodwind and string lines and, in this case, even the choir. Elfman can allow these lines of intermingling orchestral sections to continue for lengthy periods, as heard in the opening three and final two cues on the album for Instinct. These cues are really quite easy to enjoy, because while the beauty within them is complicated by the various ideas explored at once, Elfman manages to keep the entire package rooted in a positive, harmonious spirit. The album's two detractions are its necessary, dissonant action sequences, heard in "The Killing" and "The Riot." Otherwise, interludes of the ethereal choir from Elfman's earliest days often lend soothing tones, including several lovely passages in "Into the Wild." But the orchestral elements are often betrayed by the omnipresent electric bass and the synthetic percussion that Elfman employs. If he had used the bass strings to convey the same gravity as in his early works, and conjured some convincingly fresh, authentic percussion for the African sequences, then Instinct would easily have been a better score. As it stands, it relies on the consistency of Elfman's mannerisms to carry its length, and for many listeners, that won't be enough. A strong, overarching structure is not displayed with much clarity, making it a disappointingly nebulous listening experience. One complaint that everyone can agree on is the short running time of the Varèse Sarabande album, which only offers 38 minutes of music from the long film and omits several key sequences. On the whole, Elfman's music is pleasant and undemanding for much of its running time on album, but it doesn't reveal itself in the kind of presentation that most listeners will demand. ***   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.