Buy it... only if you regularly relax to James Horner's most introverted and contemplative character-centered scores that feature plenty of solo performances of lonely melodies.

Avoid it... if you demand any kind of excitement or interesting instrumental and thematic development in your scores, for this is an auto-pilot effort of little originality.

Horner

To Gillian on Her 37th Birthday: (James Horner) Adapted by David E. Kelley from a play and directed by Michael Pressman in 1996, 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 that he imagines his wife's ghost in conversations with her along the beach outside their home. 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 might feel at family gatherings with the in-laws that you try to avoid because the routine is always the same. The film suffered from a slap-down in unenthusiastic reviews and disappeared from theatres not song after its mainly arthouse debut. For composer James Horner, To Gillian on Her 37th Birthday came on the heels of a last minute job for The Spitfire Grill, another arthouse film with similar explorations of coming of age and survival, and arguably one that is just as unsuccessful. On Horner's part, however, the quality of the two scores could not be further apart. While the circumstances surrounding Horner's surprising involvement with The Spitfire Grill, along with its more engrossingly developed personality, gained that score considerable attention in autumn of 1996, the music for To Gillian on Her 37th Birthday has fallen off the radar just as badly as the film itself. Although his soundtrack for the later film is certainly functional, Horner's contribution lacks emotional depth and melodic inspiration while being minimally rendered. This may be a fault directly correlated to the film's demeanor, but then again, you get the impression with To Gillian on Her 37th Birthday that Horner had once more shifted into auto-pilot, going through all the usual motions for a small scale character drama without taxing his abilities at any moment.

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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 main 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 in this variation. 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 the environment as possible. Many of the motifs Horner utilizes, especially in the 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 desolate theme over and over and over again, rotating between solo instruments over pacing that could put even the most hyperactive child to sleep. While a certain amount of that material makes for a consistently pleasant listening experience, Horner fails to even try addressing the stunning Nantucket locale, a considerable flaw in the film. Before the lengthy finale and end title enunciation of the main theme by the ensemble, the only disparate element in the score is the sharp piano clanging heard in "Boating Accident" (which is naturally 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 theme in the first half of "Saying Goodbye" will be of interest to collectors of Horner's atmospheric sentimentality. Seasoned listeners will either mock or be amused by the exact, note-for-note previews of the upcoming Titanic love theme (still a year off the coast) performed by oboe and clarinet at the start of that finale cue. An overdue full ensemble performance of the theme at 10:00 into "End Title" is too little, too late to resurrect your interest. Overall, the film likely didn't deserve anything better than the uninspired score that Horner provided, but the result on album is an underachieving repetition of solo melodies that suffer from shallowness when compared to the composer's greater collection of character-based work. **   Amazon.com Price Hunt: CD or Download

Bias Check:

For James Horner reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.13 (in 98 reviews) and the average viewer rating is 3.25 (in 184,725 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.