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Review of The Next Three Days (Danny Elfman)
FILMTRACKS RECOMMENDS:
Buy it... if you seek a lightly rhythmic suspense score with a
surprisingly tender personality maintained by soft instrumental tones
led by piano and strings.
Avoid it... if you expect truly engaging suspense material to emerge from what is ultimately a conservatively somber exercise in ambience broken at the climax by one strikingly beautiful cue of vocal and percussive redemption.
FILMTRACKS EDITORIAL REVIEW:
The Next Three Days: (Danny Elfman) Among the
bigger disappointments of the late 2010 Hollywood season was The Next
Three Days, director Paul Haggis' remake of the 2007 French film
Pour Elle. The Lionsgate investment barely surpassed its budget
in box office grosses, its solid cast largely considered wasted in
mixed, but mostly poor reviews by critics. Russell Crowe plays a husband
who has to undertake extraordinary measures in planning the escape of
his wife, who is imprisoned falsely for the murder of a colleague. Crowe
consults with a hardened criminal and master of escape in the form of
Liam Neeson, and a complicated series of events is constructed to both
elude the authorities in the setting of Pittsburg and ensure passage to
a country hostile to the United States. Meanwhile, a secondary set of
plans to send the police on false leads is also executed. While
intelligent in some of its methodology, the plot was targeted for being
unreasonably stretched in its logic at various points during the escape.
Another aspect of the film that slips by without much praise is Danny
Elfman's conservative score. Haggis had collaborated successfully with
Mark Isham for his most personal projects, including the popular
Crash, outside of his contributions to the James Bond franchise
and Clint Eastwood films. Haggis also did rewrite work on Teminator
Salvation, however, and after his high profile resignation from
Scientology drove a wedge between him and an enraged Isham (a Scientologist
of the highest order), that involvement with the 2009 film may have led to
the director's request that Elfman score The Next Three Days.
Interestingly, despite the fact that Elfman has one of the most unique
musical voices in the industry (not only vocally, but in terms of
instrumental style), the score asked of him during the mutually lauded
collaborative process between the composer and director was ultimately
much closer to the style of Isham's usual low-key thriller music, a
point of concern given that composer's tendency to underwhelm in such
circumstances. Elfman had written music for the genre previously,
including the Crowe-led Proof of Life, with the best basis for
this approach being his unconventional but instrumentally similar The
Kingdom more recently. Whereas that 2007 score was a brutal exercise
in gritty electronic rhythms and pounded percussive effects, The Next
Three Days is a much lighter, more contemplative variation on the
same basic emotional appeal. The resulting score adequately maintains
the director's desired ambience and is never really offensive in any of
its parts, but it won't strike you as remotely memorable, either.
The instrumental palette for The Next Three Days is kept to a minimum, forcing Elfman to derive tension from an orchestral string section and a variety of soloists on piano, electric and acoustic guitars, synthesizers, and slight percussion joined by, oddly in a couple of circumstances, ethnic female voice. Why Elfman sought Balkan-styled wordless singing from Ayana Haviv (a veteran of several scores) for this assignment is something of a mystery (likely pointing to Haggis), but despite some misgivings some listeners may have for such techniques of lament in film music these days, her performances are striking highlights along the same general lines, coincidentally, as those in James Newton Howard's The Water Horse: Legend of the Deep. The strings are often split into several lines of soft rhythmic action, with sometimes three different harmonic avenues explored at once. Their numbers aren't great, but never do they suffer from the lack of depth associated with chamber-sized ensembles. The piano is clearly the heart of the score, a deeply rooted organic representation of the family reinforced in the story. Like the loose ends of the narrative, most of these elements converge in the five-minute highlight of The Next Three Days, "The Truth," a lovely and redemptive expression of the harmonic lines developed in tepid variations throughout the previous hour of music. Thematically, Elfman doesn't really establish his identities with much forcefulness in the work, though he faithfully follows the primary character's stubborn persistence with a piano theme beginning in "A Way In." In the scenes involving the family together, this material is given a more saccharine personality; otherwise, it contains an abundance of repetition of notes and fluttering auxiliary lines that make it sound like a sour interpretation of a fluttering Alexandre Desplat dramatic theme. There are only a few cues in which Elfman's distinctive style of previous years shines through, usually in the form of electronic bass activity. Unfortunately, the score as presented on the identical Lionsgate and Silva Screen albums is far too redundant and slowly developed to serve as much more than an ambient background experience. The 64+ minutes of score could be whittled down to half that length and be far more engrossing. Even at its length, however, it's a pleasant enough diversion to recommend to those who prefer lightly rhythmic, non-offensive suspense music with a tender temperament. The two Moby songs at the end are equally somber but quite tolerable, a good match for the tone of Elfman's score. Seek "The Truth" for a compilation, however, because it's not only the highlight of this score, but a noteworthy cue in general from any score during the entire year. Scientologists are free to disagree and whack copies of the CD with L. Ron Hubbard books at will. ***
TRACK LISTINGS:
All Albums:
Total Time: 71:27
NOTES & QUOTES:
The insert includes notes from both the composer and director about their
collaborative process behind the score.
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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 Next Three Days are Copyright © 2010, 2011, Lionsgate Records (America), Silva Screen Records (Europe) and cannot be redistributed without the label's expressed written consent. Page created 1/25/11 (and not updated significantly since). Scientologists should be indicted with charges of trafficking wholesale buffoonery. |
