It is understandable that Hans Zimmer's music isn't the
stereotypical baseball score. The story is one of emotional
disintegration and murder, not one of inspirational teamwork. But Zimmer
completely ignores (or is ignorant of) the context of baseball as a
game, and the feeling of rejuvenation that the start of a season raises.
His charged, guitar-driven music pounds at deafening levels, and
combined with songs from Nine Inch Nails and other heavy metal
selections, it drowns out dialogue and replaces the spirit of the
baseball setting with one of militaristic force (or at least football;
perhaps Zimmer was unfamiliar with George Carlin's famous skit). Even
when the composer utilizes his synthetic-sounding strings for dramatic
effect, the score is brutally overplayed. No dominant theme is clearly
evident, nor is there an established motif that develops into terrifying
chaos as the film progresses and the obsessed fan murders players and
umpires. No progression from good to evil is experienced over the course
of the score's play, which is surprising given the very obvious and
relentless path towards personal destruction on screen. The primary
theme is a series of descending two-note figures that utilizes upbeat
electronics far too similar to
The Preacher's Wife and
Toys. A secondary cello theme grasps at the melodrama and despair
of the primary character, but it is largely orphaned by the rest of the
score. The cello's performance isn't particularly compelling in its
emphasis of key notes and the recording of the instrument is too low in
the soundscape to compete effectively with surrounding material. A
heartbeat effect in the base region during several cues is a bit
annoying in its pull from the barrel of sports genre cliches. The
ambience is largely synthesized, which is a poor choice given that the
baseball setting is one of tradition, begging for the same emotional
environment to be produced by a real orchestra. There is dark side to
the game that could be explored if you begin with the style of
The
Natural or
For the Love of the Game (although composed after
The Fan) and convincingly mutate it from its Americana roots and
place it at the mercy of electronics. That would have made this music
exquisite.
Instead, Zimmer produces an adequate, though badly
misplaced suspense score that accomplishes nothing more than a brooding
sense of mood, dropping style for faceless ambience that barely touches
upon the character motivations in the film and ignores context. The lack
of creativity by Zimmer is compounded by the same kind of general tone
that was heard in
The House of the Spirits, which, when layered
with an extra dose of weighty string melodrama, becomes tedious and
ridiculous. The scenes of actual play on the baseball field are comical
in their use of music; Zimmer and whomever the dolt is who decided upon
the song use in the picture haven't a clue as to what kind of music you
really hear at baseball games. More than in any of his other scores,
Zimmer seemed asleep at the wheel, and if this exact music wasn't the
demand of Scott, then the composer obviously took the lazy path here. A
series of thumping minor third performances on electric bass (or an
equivalent bottom dweller) for many of the suspense scenes is the
ultimate in "easy road" philosophy. If Scott and Zimmer had been on the
ball, they could have consulted with Blake Edwards'
Experiment in
Terror, a 1962 thriller in which the murderer is killed on the
pitching mound of Candlestick Park during a Giants game. In that film,
the combined silence during scenes of mad chasing through the crowd and
an orchestral burst of energy at the end perfectly captured the spirit
of the horror genre and placed it in the baseball setting. But what can
you expect from a trashy, modern thriller in which real-life player John
Kruk (a huge man even in his playing days) dies from a stab wound to the
shoulder during a game? Stupidity in this film is rampant, and Zimmer's
music did nothing to attempt to solve the situation, whether by his own
lack of homework on the subject or by the directives of the film's
producers. The score plays poorly in the film, and 20 minutes of it,
along with several of the songs that were also out of place in the
picture, were provided on a commercial album at the time of the film's
1996 release. Parts of Zimmer's one lengthy suite on the commercial
product fit remarkably well with the heavy metal songs, not to mention
The Peacemaker and other similar scores of the era for the
composer.
As to be expected, more selections from the score
became available on the bootleg market, courtesy of the plethora of
die-hard Zimmer collectors (most of whom dismiss all legitimate
questions about the appropriateness of this score and simply accept it
at face value). Originally, a ten-track, 45-minute score album was
released that contained music that wasn't formatted for the commercial
album. Some of this material featured a few snippets of dialogue from
the film, including the "Fan Poem" performed by De Niro. That particular
recording is alone a perfect example of how Zimmer missed the mark in
this score; the poem itself is so redemptive on one side and so creepy
on the other, and Zimmer does absolutely nothing to address either
emotional requirement in that otherwise blindly pleasant piece (which
exists without the dialogue in the lengthy suite). Later, another
bootleg surfaced that combined the ten cues from the first bootleg with
the two Zimmer-composed tracks from the commercial album (one being the
score suite and the other being a song that Zimmer composed for the
project). Two similar variations, with different track orders, exist of
this bootleg. Among all of Zimmer's scores to be passed around the
secondary market in this form,
The Fan is probably the most
unnecessary, with the most notable material pressed on the commercial
album and the bootlegs often varying wildly in sound quality from track
to track. Even if you completely forget the rotten film and the fact
that Zimmer failed in every regard to put his score in context, the
music isn't a very interesting listening experience on album. It doesn't
have the dramatic weight of his later scores in the same genre, nor does
it exhibit the same consistently rhythmic action music heard in the
previous year's
Crimson Tide. Those who claim that the music
succeeds in addressing the turmoil in the De Niro character's head are
resigning themselves to mediocrity when so much potential existed for a
more intelligently devious score. It's a frustrating case all around.
Perhaps all could have been forgiven if the filmmakers had included,
along with the 3,000 extras and 10,000 cut-outs, Candlestick Park's best
known night game inhabitants: drunk naked guys running around the ring
of the upper deck in 40-degree weather carrying ice cream cones. But how
would Zimmer have scored that?
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