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Mr. Baseball: (Jerry Goldsmith) Opening on the same day
as
The Mighty Ducks in October, 1992,
Mr. Baseball caps off
the real baseball season with yet another formula-based sports movie. Tom
Selleck is convincing in his role as an aging slugger and first-baseman for
the New York Yankees who womanizes, chew tobacco, and speaks before
thinking, but basically has a good heart (and is apparently steroids-free,
thank goodness). Witnessing his decline, the New York Yankees trade him to a
Japanese team, the Nagoya Dragons, and the rather unsophisticated brute is
forced to not only fix a hole in his swing, but become accustomed to (and
appreciative of) an entirely new culture and language. Along the way, he
falls in love with an endorsement rep for the team (a beautiful young
Japanese woman), finally accepts the advice of his manager, and ultimately
helps the team advance to a playoff confrontation with its archrival. The
film did have a certain amount of charm and genuine comedy, although amid
merely average reviews, the project quickly became a late-night television
find. Composer Jerry Goldsmith had a long and varied collaboration with
director Fred Schepisi in the 1990's, yielding one of the composer's
greatest scores,
The Russia House. Also among the lot were comedy and
jazz-influenced works like
Six Degrees of Separation,
I.Q.,
and
Fierce Creatures, none of which spectacular scores (in fact, the
funky
I.Q. is probably the best of them). Unfortunately,
Mr.
Baseball ranks near the bottom of the list when it comes to quality,
simply because of Goldsmith's odd choice of style for the score. The film
has two distinct parts: the titles and scenes in which the setting is the
baseball diamond, and the character-building scenes of romance and culture
adjustment. Goldsmith essentially has created two different scores for those
two settings, setting himself up for a combined soundtrack that suffers from
its worse half being a hugely fatal flaw.
The better half of the score merits some significant
discussion because it is one of Goldsmith's rare ventures into cultural
romance in the later stages of his career. The budding romance and cues of
loneliness for the star player are scored with a love theme that exceeds
many of Goldsmith's other delightful melodies of the early 90's in quality.
As with other Fred Schepisi films, Goldsmith employs lazy jazz in the form
of an electric bass and piano for some of this material, but fifteen minutes
of pure beauty occupy the score with a small orchestral ensemble led by a
James Horner standard, the Japanese sakauhachi flute. Goldsmith's use of the
instrument is far more restrained, however, allowing Japanese culture to
enter his orchestral work in subtle steps. Along with acoustic guitar and
sometimes broad strokes of counterpoint, lengthier cues like "Call Me Jack/A
Wise Brain" move at the pace of a John Barry romance piece. Unfortunately
for listeners, this evocative music is shattered in many places by the
heinous choice of sounds Goldsmith creates for the baseball sequences. His
begins with the six-note "
charge" motif used in ballparks all around
the world and writes a catchy interpretation of the "Baby Elephant Walk" at
spirited rhythms that we'd hear in
I.Q. the next year. The six-note
baseball motif would be very creatively interpreted throughout the score
--even by the native flute-- but it's the choice of instrumentation for the
baseball rhythms that ruin this score. An electric pipe organ, electric
guitar, modern percussion, clapping sounds and other frightful samples, all
existing in the extremely irritating context of the baseball motif and "Baby
Elephant Walk" rhythm are beyond most tolerance levels, and they cheapen
this score considerably. The frustrating part of this choice of
instrumentation is that it is so consistently wretched throughout the entire
score. Only in "Swing Away" does the orchestra and band strike a seemingly
happy balance. Perhaps the problem with these cues is the rip-off of themes,
or maybe it's simply the horrid electric organ. But Goldsmith rarely wrote
music this insufferable in the later stages of his career, and along with an
equally treacherous Fairchild-performed song, "Shabondama Boogie," at the
end, the beautiful cues in the middle are woefully buried.
**
| 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 120,040 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.
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The insert includes no extra information about the score or film.
