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.

Horner

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.

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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 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. **

Bias Check:

For James Horner reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.12 (in 89 reviews) and the average viewer rating is 3.34 (in 158,769 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.