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| Poledouris |
For Love of the Game: (Basil Poledouris) There are
many things for baseball fans to admire about Sam Raimi's first
mainstream, large budget motion picture,
For Love of the Game.
Its loyalty to an authentic Major League game is exhibited in its
visuals, its star (Kevin Costner) is a tested on-screen veteran of the
game, and announcers Vin Scully and Steve Lyons have familiar voices
even a decade after the film's debut. Its main detriment, like most good
sports films, comes in the half of the film outside of the white chalk
lines, and
For Love of the Game is, primarily, a love story. At
the end of a long career with the dismal Detroit Tigers, Costner's
40-year-old pitcher is being forced into retirement after the last game
of the 1999 season. While he reflects upon his life and his lost love
during the pitching of that outing against the New York Yankees, he
flirts with a perfect game, leading to an opportunity for salvation on
and off the diamond. Raimi had a strong, lasting collaboration with
composer Danny Elfman, and it would have been interesting to hear the
composer's take on a blend of contemporary romance and the American
pastime. More qualified would have been James Newton Howard, a mainstay
of Costner's films during the actor/director's decline. The assignment
went, however, to Basil Poledouris, a smart choice because of his
lengthy history of writing personal scores with a touch of Americana. It
is exactly that type of score that Poledouris provided for
For Love
of the Game, and it would turn out to be the composer's final
mainstream effort before illness and troubles in his personal life
concluded his artistic contributions. As his career sputtered to a sorry
finish in the early 2000's (before his death in 2006), it eventually
became clear that the duo of
Les Misérables and
For
Love of the Game were the last of the composer's truly engaging
works. The latter score is far less spectacular, but it speaks to the
roots of Poledouris' habit of reaching to the heart of characters on
screen and provided them with appropriately warm music.
Comparisons to Randy Newman's music for
The
Natural or James Horner's
Field of Dreams, both heavily
praised, are tempting, but while
For Love of the Game is a film
with baseball as its narrative inspiration, the score is really about
one man's recollections about his life. It's an upbeat, gracious, and
easy-going score with a blend of contemporary rhythms and orchestral
fortitude. Poledouris' knack for brilliantly balancing the organic and
synthetic for a character score is legendary, and he's on his game here.
One primary theme occupies the entire score, heroic and monumental in
the climax of "Last Pitch" while sensitive and tingling in the
flashbacks of "Relationship Montage." The extremely affable "Main Theme"
suite covers both of these bases, and in the solo woodwind renditions of
the theme, Poledouris' music sounds remarkably similar in its slight
stature to
Kimberly the following year. The slight country and
rock rhythms, complete with percussion suitable for an elevator speaker,
are necessarily accessible though somewhat generic and bland. The
score's outward comedy moments pull hard at the country strings, and
"Tuttle Knockdown" and "Gus Hits" are definitely three minutes that
needed to be subtracted from the score's album. The electric guitars in
these cues are unacceptably obnoxious despite the intended abrasive
personality; far better are the performances of the instrument when it
accompanies the full orchestral ensemble. An acoustic guitar serves as
the grounding element of the score's personality, strumming along with
the upper-range synthetic effects and producing the same
family-friendly, comfortable atmosphere as
Free Willy. The piano
is also used to the same end in "Jane's Home" and "The Decision," both
of which are as endearing as they are smooth. The latter cue features an
impressive full ensemble variation on the theme, with piano adding
elegant counterpoint. The mix of the solo instruments with the ensemble
is impressively clear, and the electronics are, as typical in
Poledouris' scores, resounding in their use of the full sonic
spectrum.
The final cue on album, "Last Pitch," is worthy of some
discussion on its own, for its style defies the restrained environment
of the remainder of the score. The cue's final three minutes add an
adult chorus to the mix of orchestra, electric and acoustic guitars, and
synthetic rhythms. The resulting repetitions of the title theme, along
with some generally pleasing chord progressions of massive scope in
between, would be suitable for an adventure film of far wider
implications. The momentous proportions of this cue are a surprising
conclusion to an otherwise humble score, creating an outstanding
listening experience on album but perhaps overplaying its hand in the
film. In terms of sports film music,
For Love of the Game does
not achieve the same amount of inspirational spirit that Jerry Goldsmith
was able to conjure for other stories, though nothing in either
Hoosiers or
Rudy tries to generate the power of "Last
Pitch." The triumphant explosion of melody in that cue is a highlight of
Poledouris' entire career, despite its somewhat awkward, bombastic
stance. The score as a whole relies upon the fifteen or so minutes of
truly gorgeous orchestral contributions to survive. But survive it does,
and that melodic half of the score will be a necessarily inclusion for
any Poledouris collector. At the time of the film's release, a
fifteen-minute promotional album of Poledouris' score was floated in
response to a commercial song-only album that featured only one small
suite of the very best music from the score. This album fetched hundreds
of dollars in blazing online bidding, and these buyers must have felt
silly when Varèse Sarabande eventually offered 33 minutes of the
score on an album later in the year. Ironically, it's one of the rare
circumstances in which a short Varèse album would have been
better without the three minutes of irritating hard country tones in
"Tuttle Knockdown" and "Gus Hits." For fans who were disappointed with
Mickey Blue Eyes earlier in 1999 after a year of the composer's
absence from the scoring stage,
For Love of the Game was a
pleasant surprise. In retrospect, it's the best part of a bittersweet
goodbye to a favorite composer in his waning years.
**** @Amazon.com: CD or
Download
| Bias Check: |
For Basil Poledouris reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.52
(in 33 reviews)
and the average viewer rating is 3.26
(in 34,612 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.
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