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| Elfman |
Darkman: (Danny Elfman) Long before composer Danny
Elfman would team with director Sam Raimi for the highly successful
first two
Spider-Man films, there came the very early Raimi film
Darkman, the start of the director/producer's fascination with
comic book heroes. After the massive success of
Batman in 1989,
for both the fate of comic book characters on the big screen and for
Elfman in that genre, a significant number of other adaptations began to
flow into theatres throughout the 1990's. Interestingly,
Darkman
was one of the few not to be based on a historical character. Instead of
visualizing an existing character, Raimi and a host of writers concocted
the story of Dr. Peyton Westlake, a talented scientist experimenting
with synthetic skin who is left for dead and badly mangled after hitmen
destroy his lab. In the process, Westlake's nerves are altered by
doctors and he achieves both superhuman strength and uncontrollable
rage. Obsessed with the destruction of his enemies, as well as the lost
love of his girlfriend, the Darkman goes about his revenge while using
his synthetic skin to assume multiple characters, including his former
self. A nightmare of a picture,
Darkman is as much a product of
its Gothic surroundings as
Batman was, and it's no surprise
whatsoever that Elfman was anxious to score the picture. At that period
in Elfman's career, the composer couldn't get enough of morbidly tragic
characters, and his music for those identities was usually as consistent
in its symphonic depth as it was in its success. While
Darkman is
not as well-known as
Batman and
Edward Scissorhands, its
themes contain many of the same basic structures that Elfman fans have
come to love from the morbidly tragic scores from that period of
Elfman's work. Unfortunately,
Darkman also suffers from the
effect of using the table scraps from those other scores. The composer
was still attempting to broaden his technical proficiency at writing
lengthy cues, and his music from these years sometimes struggled to
approach similar topics from different directions. In the case of
Darkman, the score is reminiscent of
Batman Returns in
that the underlying composition deserved a far more vibrant performance
and recording. A 2020 remastered and expanded presentation doesn't
appreciably solve this nagging issue on album.
Everything about
Darkman is saturated with the
same dense, dark, and determined styles that made
Batman a
classic the previous year. But like
Dick Tracy, another 1990
comic-style score from Elfman,
Darkman is less coherent and more
heavily reliant on overbearing style over the substance of its thematic
ideas. Much of this phenomenon relates to the underlying rhythmic
movement of the march that Elfman utilizes for the "Main Titles" and the
related waltz, which becomes more evident in "The Plot Unfolds." The
title theme, dominated by a pair of nearly identical four-note phrases,
offers all the fascinating desolation and hopeless suffering that we can
hope for in the story, and Elfman weaves this theme into his score with
dexterity, especially in the short but haunting "Julie Discovers
Darkman" cue. A separate love theme struggles to assert itself in the
first half of the score and is eventually overtaken by agonizingly
tortured string renditions of the main theme. The suspense and action
underscore is highly reminiscent of the motifs used throughout
Batman, with "High Steel" combining the bubbling timpani, rapid
trumpet blasts, and abundant cymbal crashes and snare rips together with
rolling bass string motifs very similar to action sequences in the
earlier work. While this music is entertaining at a basic level, its
continued obvious use here makes
Darkman perhaps the most blatant
re-hash score of Elfman's career. Some of this material was destined for
better expression in
The Nightmare Before Christmas. The best
arrangement of this music exists in the
Beetlejuice redux, "Woe,
The Darkman... Woe," sometimes accessed as a concert piece from the
score. Two standout cues distinguish themselves from the continuous
re-use: both "Rage/Peppy Science" and "Carnival From Hell" play to the
carnival atmosphere in the film, with the latter cue serving as an
almost intolerably sick interpretation of calliope music by Elfman,
though he predictably lets the chaos of the full symphony eat away at
the barrel organ until we're in full horror swing. There is a touch of
Christopher Young's
Hellraiser influence here as well. The score
ends with one of Elfman's weaker finales, lacking in any ambitious
crescendo or ultimate musical expression of futility. In retrospect,
it's very easy for
Darkman to slip through the cracks in Elfman's
career; there's just so little original style here that the score leaves
you seeking its close cousins, all of which superior. The 2020 expanded
album is moderately interesting but doesn't alter the equation by nearly
doubling the length. It aims for only the most ardent enthusiasts of
Elfman's most tortured brooding.
** @Amazon.com: CD or
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| Bias Check: |
For Danny Elfman reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.16
(in 87 reviews)
and the average viewer rating is 3.27
(in 151,403 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.
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The insert of the 1990 MCA album includes no extra information about the score
or film. That of the 2020 La-La Land set contains lengthy commentary about both.
