Filmtracks Traffic Rank: #2,109
Written 9/14/22
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Buy it... if Danny Elfman's most minimalistic and intimate dramatic
scores for small ensembles interest you, especially if they generate a
somber and restrained ambience for a conversational film.
Avoid it... if you expect Elfman to provide music as intellectually
stimulating as the authors depicted in the story, his contribution
barely registering compared to the many song placements on screen.
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| Elfman |
The End of the Tour: (Danny Elfman) Unless you're
an enthusiast of literary intellectualism and talking head movies,
The End of the Tour will leave you as cold as its settings in
Michigan and Minnesota. The 2015 film tells of two best-selling authors,
David Lipsky and David Foster Wallace, the former interviewing the
latter for Rolling Stone magazine over several days in 1996 after
Wallace's "Infinite Jest" novel received massive critical acclaim. The
simmering tension and eventual friendship in the interactions between
the men occupy the entirety of the film, their conversations laced with
deep sadness but wicked humor. The bleak landscape of the movie
accentuates the somewhat uncomfortable relationship, though mutual
respect eventually emerges. After Wallace's suicide in 2008, Lipsky
wrote his own memoir that included details about the making of the
article, and relatively novice director James Ponsoldt was provided
additional, previously unknown details about the time around the
interview that became revelatory for those already invested in the
story. Wallace's estate, while approving of The End of the Tour
to some degree, ultimately did not favor the movie. Still, critics
showered the picture with immense praise even if audiences didn't find
as much interest in its deeply conversational nature. The director
applied a variety of period-specific songs to the movie, as well as a
Brian Eno piece that functioned much like score material. The film
represented the first collaboration between Ponsoldt and composer Danny
Elfman, who was particularly moved by the topic of the story. The
composer was entering a period of his career when he sought more
intimate projects that allowed him to be directly involved in the
performance of his film scores. The minimal budget of The End of the
Tour obviously precluded the hiring of an orchestra for the movie,
though the story likely would not have benefitted from one. Elfman still
wanted to use organic sounds as much as possible, and he particularly
honed in on utilizing glassy sounds for the ice and cold of the
location. He landed on bowed strings and glass harmonica sounds to aid
the style of the score, the specialty strings mostly affecting "Walking
the Dog" while the glassy tones are manifested the most in "Going Sour"
and "Reprise 2." Also of consideration was his need to capture the sense
of tension between the two lead characters, yielding uneasy harmonies at
times.
The result of Elfman's exploration for
The End of
the Tour is one of his most understated career works, minimally
rendered and rarely exercising overt dramatic effect. Sparse strings,
keyboards, bells, electric guitars, electric bass, organ, and synth
effects make up much of the soundscape, the ensemble familiar to Elfman
works dating back to restrained scores of the 1990's and later moments
of quiet contemplation serving as a template for the equivalent cues in
Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot a few years later. The
score is largely monothematic, with one significant deviation. The main
theme of the picture consists of two-note call and answer figures
resolving to tonal chord shifts, a pleasant but anonymous and slowly
paced idea that is littered throughout most of the cues. Heard first at
0:31 into "Intro" on bells, the idea shifts to lower tones at 0:23 into
"Room of Books" but accelerates at 0:25 into "Minneapolis" as an
interlude to another melodic idea. It persists on guitar throughout
"Reprise 1" in very tentative form with dissonant synths on top and
breaks through the glassy haze late in "Going Sour." The theme opens
"The Tour's Over" but dissolves to darker meanderings, bells returning
for the pairs of notes in "Walking the Dog" and late in "Invasion" after
being keyboarded earlier in that cue. The longer version of the melody
emerges again in "The Shoe" as the bells continue over electric guitar,
and those bells are more subdued over layers of electronics and strings
in "Reprise 2." For a film about two men in constant interaction, the
structure of the theme is keen but simple, though the idea never really
evolves much in performance inflection over the course of the score even
if it does eventually expand into a longer melodic line. A fleeting
secondary theme provides the most hopeful and positive music in the
score, either for the location or the excitement of the interviewer as
he travels with Wallace. This idea's wandering guitar lines are
optimistic in "Minneapolis" and return with spirit in "Mall of America,"
the main theme serving as quick interlude. A different variation of this
comparatively upbeat material closes "Talk to Jan." Those three very
brief moments, however, represent the totality of the "happy" music in
the score for
The End of the Tour. Because Elfman wrote so little
material for the project, only 22 minutes of score is included on a
43-minute album that otherwise features songs interspersed distractingly
between Elfman's short cues. The composer's collectors may still find
merit in this brief and rather cold, somber presentation, though for
most, this music will be best appreciated solely in context.
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- Music as Written for the Film: ***
- Music as Heard on Album: **
- Overall: **
Bias Check:
For Danny Elfman reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.12
(in 95 reviews) and the average viewer rating is 3.26
(in 154,830 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.
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