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To Gillian on her 37th Birthday
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Composed, Orchestrated, Conducted, and Produced by:
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James Horner
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Release Date:
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October 1st, 1996
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Availability:
Regular U.S. release, but the album quickly disappeared from stores due to a limited pressing and has been difficult to find since.
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Filmtracks Recommends:
Buy it... only if you regularly relax to James Horner's most
introverted and contemplative character-scores with plenty of solo theme
performances.
Avoid it... if you demand any kind of excitement or interesting
instrumental and thematic development from your scores.
Filmtracks Editorial Review:
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To Gillian on her 37th Birthday: (James Horner) Adapted
by David E. Kelley from a play and directed by Michael Pressman, To
Gillian on her 37th Birthday is a prolonged story about one man's grief
over the death of his wife. Becoming a recluse on Nantucket Island with his
16-year-old daughter, the man suffers so much in the two years that follow a
boating accident, he imagines his wife's ghost in conversations with her
along the beach outside their home. Heck, maybe that's what happens when you
marry and then lose Michelle Pfeiffer. But the film's unoriginal, drawn out
story follows predictable paths of the daughter's coming of age and the
nosey sister-in-law/aunt who attempts to first set up the ailing father on a
blind date (before eventually trying to steal custody of the girl). For a
survival story, To Gillian on her 37th Birthday is an exercise in a
familiar sense of boredom... the kind of discomfort you get at family
gatherings with the in-laws that you try to avoid because the routine is
always the same. The film suffered from an immediate collection of
unenthusiastic reviews and disappeared from theatres. For composer James
Horner, To Gillian on her 37th Birthday comes on the heels of a last
minute job for The Spitfire Grill, a film also about coming-of-age
and survival, and arguably just as unsuccessful. On the part of Horner,
however the quality of the two scores could not be further from each other.
While the circumstances surrounding Horner's involvement with The
Spitfire Grill, along with its more developed personality, gained that
score considerable attention in autumn of 1996, the score for To Gillian
on her 37th Birthday has fallen off the radar just as badly as the film.
While his music is certainly functional for the film, Horner's production
lacks inspiration and is minimally rendered. This may be a fault directly
correlated with the film, but then again, you get the impression with To
Gillian on her 37th Birthday that Horner was once again on
auto-pilot.
The ensemble for To Gillian on her 37th Birthday
consists of Horner's usual array of solo instruments along with a marginal
orchestra stripped of its unnecessary depths. The title theme concocted by
Horner is similar in structure to his basic character-based ideas for
Searching for Bobby Fischer, In Country, and Dad, with
predictable string progressions yielding less excitement and beauty.
Similarly, duets between harp and piano dance behind lonely horn solos,
often with delicate plucking of either the violins or harp adding as much
light sensitivity to environment as possible. Many of the motifs Horner
utilizes, especially in alternating piano progressions, are copied and
pasted from The Spitfire Grill, but the magic of the location has
been completely stripped. The score seems completely centered on the solace
of the main character, refusing to budge for any of the other circumstances
in the film. Thus, you get an effort that repeats the same lonely theme over
and over and over again, rotating between solo instruments, with pacing that
could put even the most hyper child to sleep. While a certain amount of that
material makes for a consistently pleasant listen, Horner fails to even try
scoring the stunning Nantucket locale... a considerable flaw in the film.
Before the lengthy finale and end title enunciation of the title theme by
the ensemble, the only disparate element in the score is the sharp piano
clanging heard in the "Boating Accident" cue (which is the source of all the
trauma in the film), and even this cue seems to short-change the importance
of the event unfolding on screen. On album, the two full performances of the
title theme in the first half of the finale track will be of interest to
collectors of Horner's atmospheric sentimentality. Fans will either mock or
be amused by the exact, note-for-note preview of the upcoming Titanic
love theme (still a year off the coast) performed by woodwinds at the start
of "Saying Goodbye." Overall, the film likely didn't deserve anything better
than Horner's uninspired score, but the result on album is an underachieving
repetition of solo themes that suffers when compared to the composer's
greater collection of character-based work. **
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Viewer Ratings and Comments:
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• 1. A Far Away Time/Main Title (3:52)
• 2. The Boating Accident (2:14)
• 3. Gillian (3:58)
• 4. The Lighthouse (2:17)
• 5. Fond Hopes... Distant Memories (2:05)
• 6. Rachel's Dream/Gillian's Visit (6:47)
• 7. The Decision to Leave Home (3:11)
• 8. Saying Goodbye/End Title (12:40)
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Insert includes no extra information about the score or film.
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