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Review of The End of the Tour (Danny Elfman)

FILMTRACKS RECOMMENDS:

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.

FILMTRACKS EDITORIAL REVIEW:

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.

• Music as Written for the Film: ***
• Music as Heard on Album: **
• Overall: **

TRACK LISTINGS:

Total Time: 40:42

• 1. Intro (1:06) • 2. Talk to Jan (1:28) • 3. Sunlight Bathed the Golden Glow - performed by Felt (2:57) • 4. Perfect Circle - performed by R.E.M. (3:25) • 5. Room of Books (1:30) • 6. Minneapolis (1:06) • 7. Reprise 1 (0:40) • 8. They Don't Know - performed by Tracey Ullman(2:59) • 9. Our Lips Are Sealed - performed by Fun Boy Three (3:34) • 10. Going Sour (1:36) • 11. The Tour's Over (3:11) • 12. Mall of America (0:48) • 13. Walkin the Dog (2:25) • 14. Invasion (3:35) • 15. The Shoe (2:25) • 16. The Big Ship - performed by Brian Eno (2:56) • 17. Here - performed by Tindersticks (4:22) • 18. Reprise 2 (3:02)

NOTES & QUOTES:

The insert includes no extra information about the score or film.

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The reviews and other textual content contained on the filmtracks.com site may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the prior written authority of Christian Clemmensen at Filmtracks Publications. All artwork and sound clips from The End of the Tour are Copyright © 2015, Lakeshore Records and cannot be redistributed without the label's expressed written consent. Page created 9/14/22 (and not updated significantly since).