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| Elfman |
Instinct: (Danny Elfman) The much-anticipated 1999
drama
Instinct was an exhibition of two actors at the top of
their game. The performances of Anthony Hopkins as a professor gone mad
and Cuba Gooding Jr. as the psychiatrist attempting to straighten him
out eclipse all else in Jon Turteltaub's film. Unfortunately,
Turteltaub's career had been made up of relatively lightweight projects,
and too many of
Instinct's plot devices were too familiar for the
story to be compelling on its own merits. Hopkins' character travels to
Africa to study gorillas and, during a span of two years that he's gone
missing, he's lost his mind. After brutally killing two men and being
captured, he is returned to America to face trial and rehabilitation.
The film alternates between tense scenes with the two leads and
flashback sequences to fill in the narrative. Composer Danny Elfman had
reportedly traveled to Africa himself before tackling
Instinct
(becoming quite ill in the process), and this assignment represented yet
another journey in a new direction for the popular composer. His career
changed significantly when he entered his 40's, leaving behind the
orchestral majesty of his early assignments and turning to dramas like
A Simple Plan,
A Civil Action, and
Instinct to
explore less fantastic realms of composition. His work of the late
1990's is often shunned by the mainstream, though it maintains a
faithful following amongst the composer's most ardent collectors.
Instinct really is a score that polarized those fans, for it
attempted to merge some elements of the composer's early style with the
mannerisms of his maturing one. Nothing about
Instinct is really
straightforward, requiring an appreciation of the layering of motifs
that Elfman typically employed at the time. There are themes, but
they're obscured. There is harmony, but it's laced with incongruous
ideas in the background. There is beauty in Elfman's standard light
choir, but it's countered by synthetic bass and percussion. There is an
overarching style, but it exists in tone rather than structure. When you
put all of this together, you get a score that is distinctly Elfman's,
but one that has a tendency to either truly engage the listener or leave
him cold. Few agreements are to be found with
Instinct, not
because it is non-functional, but because it is as elusive as the crazed
mind at the center of the film.
The primary theme of the film is a "freedom motif" that
is utilized with great effect in "Everybody Goes" and "Escape." This
theme, which appears most prominently halfway through the former cue and
at the conclusion of the latter, is remarkably powerful. But it is also
dressed with several lines of independent instrumentation, obscuring its
performances despite exuding the proper overall emotional impact. The
layering effect is something that Elfman became fond of using in this
period in his career. The days of simply presenting a theme and giving
it the full attention of nearly the entire ensemble were over. Instead,
brass performances (which were rare at the time for Elfman) of the title
theme are accompanied by meandering woodwind and string lines and, in
this case, even the choir. Elfman can allow these lines of intermingling
orchestral sections to continue for lengthy periods, as heard in the
opening three and final two cues on the album for
Instinct. These
cues are really quite easy to enjoy, because while the beauty within
them is complicated by the various ideas explored at once, Elfman
manages to keep the entire package rooted in a positive, harmonious
spirit. The album's two detractions are its necessary, dissonant action
sequences, heard in "The Killing" and "The Riot." Otherwise, interludes
of the ethereal choir from Elfman's earliest days often lend soothing
tones, including several lovely passages in "Into the Wild." But the
orchestral elements are often betrayed by the omnipresent electric bass
and the synthetic percussion that Elfman employs. If he had used the
bass strings to convey the same gravity as in his early works, and
conjured some convincingly fresh, authentic percussion for the African
sequences, then
Instinct would easily have been a better score.
As it stands, it relies on the consistency of Elfman's mannerisms to
carry its length, and for many listeners, that won't be enough. A
strong, overarching structure is not displayed with much clarity, making
it a disappointingly nebulous listening experience. One complaint that
everyone can agree on is the short running time of the Varèse
Sarabande album, which only offers 38 minutes of music from the long
film and omits several key sequences. On the whole, Elfman's music is
pleasant and undemanding for much of its running time on album, but it
doesn't reveal itself in the kind of presentation that most listeners
will demand.
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| Bias Check: |
For Danny Elfman reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.16
(in 89 reviews)
and the average viewer rating is 3.27
(in 153,889 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.
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