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| Elfman |
Proof of Life: (Danny Elfman) Despite the hype
generated by the real life romance between stars Meg Ryan and Russell
Crowe on the set of
Proof of Life, the hostage thriller was an
immense disappointment at the box office. Crowe plays a detective and
negotiator who is hired by Ryan to help find her husband, who is
kidnapped in South America by militant guerrillas. An on-screen romance
and perpetual jump from one dangerous situation to another complicate
matters. Director Taylor Hackford had worked with composer Danny Elfman
on his previous film,
Dolores Claiborne, and this time the
composer was thrust into a thriller genre that was still new to him at
this point in his career. The resulting music was most often described
as "difficult" by reviewers at the time, being that it is less saturated
with Elfman's traditional styles and therefore more difficult to grasp
or appreciate. It is a functional and adequate work, though a bit
predictable, and it excels beyond average at certain points throughout
the length of the film's plot. On album,
Proof of Life presents
more challenges than casual collectors of the composer were accustomed
to hearing, though Elfman's endeavors in the genre in the later 2000's
have largely made this sound a permanent part of his career. In all such
cases, its difficult to find solace in Elfman's thrillers, regardless of
their accurate emotional emulation of the stories they accompany. The
composer's movement towards the brash, electronic edges of the MIDI
Revolution in
Proof of Life was a disturbing embrace of a
mindless trend by an otherwise inventive composer, a trend that has
catapulted the careers of many otherwise unknown composers far less
talented than Elfman. In these respects, the electronically driven
harshness of
Proof of Life was perhaps the least recognizable
work of Elfman at the time. Even in the just previous music of
A
Simple Plan and
Instinct, there was a stylistic haunting of
Elfman's unique touch, led by shadows of minor and major key toils.
Proof of Life, on the other hand, could very well have been the
work of Don Davis, Marco Beltrami, Larry Groupé, or a dozen other
contemporary synthesizer experts.
The choppy synthetic loops and marginal thematic
development of
Proof of Life are not the kind of stylistic risks
that many had become accustomed to hearing Elfman take. The blend of
synthetic percussion is mediocre and uninspired, and its rambling
presentation is devoid of true tension. It elevates your pulse using
volume and rough textures, a tactic already tiresome from the Media
Ventures group at the time (and many years later). The style is a
combination of Hans Zimmer's
Beyond Rangoon and Elfman's own
Instinct, with some pieces of early James Horner heard in the
electronics. The only true treat for Elfman fans will be the slight,
subtle piano usage that will recall
Dolores Claiborne.
Alternating between sinister and delicate tones throughout, the music is
not engaging. It is mixed to be in your face during "Main Title," with
the acoustic bass and percussion rapturing in twisted convolutions, and
yet it doesn't actively involve you. It's all mildly interesting during
its run, but it remains underachieving in style and theme. The title
theme introduced immediately on pan pipes is largely abandoned
thereafter, and the piano and acoustic guitar fail to bring any warmth
to other ideas that Elfman attempts to inject. The exotic elements of
the score, in light of the work's anemic envelopment of the listener,
are not up to Elfman's usual level of creativity. Apart from the film,
the most interesting moments of the score are those when the acoustics
are toned down and mixed evenly with the piano and strings, as most
obviously heard in "The Miscarriage" and "The Finale." The cliched
ending, pronounced by the pounding of a few bass notes, spin the score
backwards into the pot of average, musical stew that Jerry Goldsmith
sometimes stirred at the time. On the whole, Elfman had all the basic
elements necessary to create a gripping, modern thriller, but his
technique with those ingredients is just too opaque to readily enjoy.
Most of it takes pages from the libraries of similarly conceived and
performed efforts by many lesser-known composers of the era. The
love/hate relationship that listeners had with Elfman didn't really
apply to
Proof of Life, for the score is a rare time when the
composer flirts with a concept usually absent from his career:
boredom.
** @Amazon.com: CD or
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| Bias Check: |
For Danny Elfman reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.12
(in 95 reviews)
and the average viewer rating is 3.26
(in 154,830 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.
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The insert includes no extra information about the score or film.
