: (James Horner) With
so many audiences familiar with the classic, 22-minute cartoon narrated
by Boris Karloff that has appeared for generations on network television
each Christmas, director Ron Howard was the beneficiary of a studio
bidding war to expand upon that faithful adaptation of the Dr. Seuss
book with his own live action version of 90 minutes in 2000.
Concentrating on meticulous make-up and studio set designs, Howard's
opens with an hour of background
material about the snowflake town of Whoville and its Grinch before
launching into the more familiar part of the story in its final third.
With these additional revelations about the past of the Grinch,
audiences get a better idea as to why he would be motivated to sneak
down off his mountain of garbage and steal all the Christmas presents
and decorations on the eve of the holiday. One of the main attractions
of the film was the lead performance by Jim Carrey, though his acting
was strangely obscured by the amount of makeup placed on him to mirror
the drawn version of the character. The film wasn't received well,
especially by critics, with the harsh colors, confined settings, and
intentionally blurry photography producing an awkward feel that
dissatisfied the same viewers who would eventually be turned off by
. The marketing blitz surrounding the film
informed weary adults that the big new version of
was largely a marketing ploy, and one significant
part of that shiny object was the film's soundtrack. Songs from the old
cartoon were interpolated into the film, as were a few new orchestral
and ensemble cast pieces. But with these songs came 'N Sync and Faith
Hill, among others, eventually yielding an extremely disjointed
soundtrack album representing an odd mix of cast songs, rock songs,
dialogue, and orchestral underscore. Along for the journey once again
with Howard was composer James Horner, who contributed to both the song
integration in
as well as the
film's roughly 60 minutes of original score. While Horner is no stranger
to the production of large-scale children's scores for fluffy films,
this endeavor attempted to compete with the film's larger
commercialistic intentions and lost that battle.
As for the merits of that score, Horner was placed into
the untenable position of attempting to balance the comedy elements of
parody levels with the serious drama and character salvation awaiting
audiences at the end of the picture. John Williams had proven with
Home Alone and
Hook that such a balance could be struck,
and Danny Elfman had skirted this territory with a few of his early,
popular scores. But Horner, for all his experience in the children's
genre, had rarely tackled a holiday score specifically. He addressed
Whoville with the appropriate set of tingling, metallic percussion that
you'd expect for the holidays, but on the whole, the score doesn't ooze
with holiday spirit. Instead, you hear an interesting combination of the
dramatic sensibilities that Horner had employed countless times in the
past (for both the children's genre and more serious adult topics) and
his occasional attempts to dabble in the rhythmically and instrumentally
wacky world of Elfman and Rachel Portman. As such, the score is really
divided much like the film; the first 40 minutes of flashbacks into the
past of the Grinch come with the usual parody techniques that often
approach the bizarre. Source ensemble songs imitate fart and theremin
sounds and present delirious solos for orchestral players who likely
don't have as much fun recording your everyday film scores. The
integration of Vangelis'
Chariots of Fire into "Cheermeister
Vote" is representative of a creative avenue of thought rare for Horner
by 2000. Most of this comedy material, often flirting with hints of
danger that inevitably include Horner's famous four-note "danger motif,"
has been heard throughout his career, though it should be noted that the
ensemble performance in
How the Grinch Stole Christmas is quite
robust and well-mixed. Even in the adaptation of Vangelis' theme for the
aforementioned parody track, the performance is impressively deep. The
resonating performances especially aid the later tracks. Horner's
primary two themes for the film, the first of which owing much to
Home Alone in the simplistic main melody of "Christmas, Why Can't
I Find You" and adapted into the cast and Faith Hill songs, receive
significant attention in the latter half of the score. Even Horner's
more obnoxious mischief theme for the Grinch, a perpetual annoyance up
until "Does Cindy Lou Really Ruin Christmas?," matures to impressively
redemptive ends in the final cues.
As the film transitions to the story seen in both the
book and the original cartoon, Horner kicks his score into high gear.
The percussive creativity of "The Big Heist," accompanied by brilliant
employment of brass accents, is a highlight of the mischief theme.
Thereafter, the score turns completely serious, offering a dramatic
sensitivity consistent with
Bicentennial Man and rambling piano
foreshadowing
A Beautiful Mind, especially with the employment of
a light choir that is so fluid as to almost sound synthetic. Its humming
in the gorgeous "A Change of Heart" will remind of the haunting,
sorrowful theme from
Casper. A crescendo of synthetic backing for
this theme in the same cue previews some of the spiritual depth of
The New World. In this and "The Sleigh of Presents," Horner
provides considerable beauty and rewards listeners who may have lost
patience with the wacky side of the score. The last fifteen minutes
truly compensate for over forty minutes of mediocre material from Horner
for the flashback portion of the film, as well as the rather lackluster
song variants of the main theme. Enthusiasts of Horner's children's
scores and lighter dramas will find significant merit hidden in these
passages, the crescendo of wholesomeness closing "The Sleigh of
Presents" a remarkable moment. Luckily, despite the ills of the
commercial album for
How the Grinch Stole Christmas, that product
does contain those fifteen or so best minutes of Horner's score
material. Otherwise, however, that original Interscope album truly was a
nightmare before Christmas in 2000. It was a Horner fan's worst fear,
with only thirty minutes of narratively challenged score designated for
the product. Ten of those minutes exist under the editing of vocals and
dialogue by cast members. The remaining twenty minutes of score is
amplified so that there is occasional interference in the treble region
when the orchestra performs in full. And then, to lighten things up,
Interscope sprinkled six or so excerpts of uninteresting movie dialogue
throughout the rest of the album, nestling them in between attempts to
appeal to the mass of thirteen-year-old Dr. Seuss fans with some rap,
alternative, pop, and funk songs, as well as the obligatory, unshaven
sex objects, 'N Sync. Finally, the late stages of production of the
album were marked with unintelligible packaging, including issues with
the track listings. In short, the die-hard Horner fan was provided with
a somewhat futile and useless product, as the composer's portion is
easily consumed by the other elements of the soundtrack.
In the end, the Interscope Records album is very much
like Jim Carrey's personality; never defining itself with clear
direction. Since that label did not produce score albums, typically
publishing rock, R&B, pop, rap, funk, gospel, and alternative music,
it's no surprise that they lost touch with Horner's effort in their
attempts to boost the marketability of the product. Horner fans didn't
have much time to complain, however, because
How the Grinch Stole
Christmas represented one of the quickest releases of a promotional
score that the community had ever seen at the time, with bootlegs of
that leaked material appearing on the secondary market within only two
weeks of Interscope's album release. Even
Apollo 13, the other
commonly questioned commercial product for Horner in that era, took
several months for Universal to crank out the score-only promo. It's not
clear if the expanded album was truly a promotional effort put forth by
Horner and/or the studio after witnessing the botched commercial album,
or if it was born as just another black-market bootleg from conveniently
leaked master mixes. The answer doesn't matter, for it served as
immediate testimony to the failure of that first album. In this case,
however, more of this score doesn't automatically make it better. The
material on the commercial album is mostly centered around the final
thirty minutes of the film (the traditional part of the story), and
these compositions are as good as it gets from Horner for
How the
Grinch Stole Christmas. When you hear more of the shorter,
parody-style of cues for the earlier portions of the film, you get the
impression that the work really was one of Horner's weakest efforts in a
number of years. It fails to stir any genuine feelings of Christmas, and
never does it establish a strong musical idea outside of the mischief
motif for the Dr. Seuss character. The comical edge of the score does
not allow it to flow as smoothly as Horner typically prefers, and the
slapstick elements of the orchestra's performance make the promo equally
unpredictable and difficult to digest. The expanded album does, though,
allow some of Horner's more creative moments to shine; the integration
of
Chariots of Fire into "Cheermeister Vote," which was absent
from the commercial album, is one of its highlights. Cues that were
hidden behind dialogue on the commercial album were offered unhindered.
In 2022, La-La Land Records took essentially the same music and
rearranged it slightly for a very similar presentation on a limited,
single-CD product with no bonus tracks but superb sound. These score
albums of 70+ minutes in length cannot salvage a flawed Horner work,
though, and
How the Grinch Stole Christmas relies solely on the
majesty of its final, lovely cues to reach your heart.
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- Score and Songs as Written for the Film: ***
- Score as Heard on the 2000 Interscope Album: *
- Score as Heard on All Other Albums: ***
- Overall: ***
| Bias Check: |
For James Horner reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.16
(in 107 reviews)
and the average viewer rating is 3.23
(in 197,406 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.
|
