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FILMTRACKS.COM
PRINTER-FRIENDLY VIEW 
Review of The Girl on the Train (Danny Elfman)
FILMTRACKS RECOMMENDS:
Buy it... if you are fully prepared for a depressingly
disillusioning listening experience that contains more intelligent
thematic and instrumental deconstruction and reconstruction than you
might expect to encounter in this genre.
Avoid it... if no keen musical manipulation by Elfman for the concept of gaslighting, not even the ten minutes of accessible material at the beginning and end, can compensate for the hideously mind-numbing and abrasive midsection of this score.
FILMTRACKS EDITORIAL REVIEW:
The Girl on the Train: (Danny Elfman) There must be
an endlessly deep well of desire in the public for horrific stories of
disillusionment in everyday life, because how else do you explain the
immense popularity of the 2015 best-selling novel and 2016 box office
success of The Girl on the Train? Granted, the concept of
"gaslighting" is intriguing, especially if you've ever considered
yourself to be a party in a psychologically abusive relationship, but
there is nothing pleasant about the fight for sanity and salvation seen
in the plot of The Girl on the Train, which largely matches
between book and film. A murder mystery in an otherwise idyllic suburban
setting is told primarily through the perspective of a woman who suffers
from alcoholism so severe that she cannot remember her own actions.
After losing her marriage, she stalks and harasses her ex-husband, his
new wife, and their neighbors, engrossed by their existence as she
watches them from her train window on the way to work. Unbeknownst to
her, there is an unsavory entanglement of sex affairs between a number
of secondary characters in this equation, and once people start dying,
she sets about trying to stay sober long enough to solve the mystery.
Director Tate Taylor had collaborated successfully on prior pictures
with composer Thomas Newman, but for the suspense realm in The Girl
on the Train, he turned to Danny Elfman, who has tackled this type
of subject in a career line parallel to his better-known fantasy and
children's film blockbusters. Elfman's tactics in the highly personal
drama and suspense genres is hit and miss, but he rarely barges ahead
with his more minimalistic soundscapes without providing at least some
intelligence to the work. The pair of The Unknown Known and
Fifty Shades of Grey in recent years, in fact, were quite
impressive in how Elfman incorporated rhythmic devices and varying
levels of tortured tonality to convey the notion of suspicion and lust,
both of which very applicable to The Girl on the Train. Not
surprisingly, this 2016 score occasionally resembles both those scores,
but only in their vague structural and instrumental similarities.
Rather, Elfman treats this film to some of the most abrasive horror
tones of his career, all in an effort to address the mind-numbing
gaslighting element of the story. Anyone approaching this music
expecting an effortless or positive listening experience is probably
being gaslighted themselves, because the word "pleasant" is the last
thing you'd use to describe this musical journey.
The small ensemble Elfman convenes for The Girl on the Train is highly typical of his methodology for more constrained situations, a string section of an orchestra joining piano, electric bass, electric guitar, solo female voices, and synthesizers to yield a very intimate setting. Expect few moments of relief from the dissonance generated to represent the overarching drunken stupor with which the main character traverses this mystery. Thematically, the score does offer her a theme, and it's in this construct that most of the intelligence in the work resides. A secondary theme for one of the other women ("Megan") is understandably the closest we get to Fifty Shades of Grey here. Neither the instrumentation nor themes alone are the attraction in The Girl on the Train, though. How Elfman manipulates them is key, because he starts the score in a somewhat diluted haze for the opening expressions of the main theme in "Riding the Train," suggesting unhappiness but at least sanity. Soon, however, he tears the theme and even the instrumental performances apart, allowing only fragments and highly manipulated, dissonant staggering of the opening cue's identity to struggle through outrageously hideous, grotesque soundscapes punctuated at times by some of the most horrific noise Elfman has ever recorded. Almost the entire mass of the interior of this score is a wasteland of deconstructed elements of that opening theme, expressed in alternatingly sparse electronic bass rhythms and grating, atonal crescendos. A rising minor-third progression dominates in the bass (this idea seems like an intentionally frustrating abbreviation of the rambling background motif that exists under the main theme in its more cohesive moments) as the piano from the start is badly distorted in its thumping on top. As the protagonist solves the mystery and exacts her revenge in the final few cues, Elfman pulls her theme back together, dropping the electronic manipulations in "Self Defense" and allowing the theme from the start to fully reassemble courtesy some angelic female vocal layering. By "Resolution," the theme's conspiratorial tone cements itself in The Unknown Known fashion, and while still somber, the closing cue at least regains clarity in its melodic and vocal personality. Overall, The Girl on the Train is an admirable but largely unlistenable experience. There are moments in "Something's Not Right" and "Really Creepy" that are high-volume, screeching noise, downright repulsive in every way possible. But the combined ten minutes of more lucid material at the start and end, punctuated by the comparatively pretty "Resolution" and "Main Titles," along with portions of the intellectually intriguing deconstruction in between, keep this score barely manageable for the Elfman enthusiast.
TRACK LISTINGS:
Total Time: 51:54
NOTES & QUOTES:
The insert includes a list of performers but no extra information about the score or film.
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