Filmtracks Traffic Rank: #2,289
Written 11/25/24
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Buy it... for an extremely conservative, lightly touched Danny
Elfman drama with almost none of the composer's trademark quirkiness.
Avoid it... if you, like Gus Van Sant, ponder why Elfman never
provides the director's stories with overtly orchestral and deeply
emotional scores, this one never really hitting the heart.
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| Elfman |
Restless: (Danny Elfman) With promising young
talent in front of the camera, director Gus Van Sant behind it, and
producer Ron Howard championing the film, 2011's Restless was a
long time in the making and ultimately yielded a substantial loss for
the studio. A story about morbid curiosity, friendship, and
neuro-divergence, the movie is a tear-jerker leading to redemption that
was simply too detached a concept to sustain its positive traits. A
teenage boy copes with the loss of his parents by attending funerals as
a hobby and talking to the ghost of a kamikaze pilot. At one of the
funerals, he meets a teenage girl with whom he falls in love, but the
catch is that she has terminal cancer and only a few months to live. How
they deal with the end of her life together helps balance the young man
moving forward. The studio withheld the movie for a long time in hopes
of aligning it for awards consideration that never came anyway. The
project did allow Van Sant to collaborate once again with Danny Elfman,
and although the director had always hoped to someday receive a
heartbreakingly orchestral, gothic score akin to the Tim Burton type
from the composer for one of his movies, his request for such music in
Restless was denied by the composer. Elfman resisted the notion
of syrupy orchestral music because he claimed that he had learned from
scoring Milk that the lesser approach on his films was best. In
the case of this project, though, a happy medium was probably the best
choice, as Elfman's minimalistic approach, though somewhat personal,
doesn't capture the true sensitivity or imagination of the picture. The
strategy chosen instead is highly familiar to the composer's 2010's
light drama mode, though this iteration lacks the quirkiness that
embodies at least parts of many equivalent scores from Elfman. The
acoustic guitar cue "Sorry For Your Loss" was written by the director
himself as an initial temp piece, and Elfman used that as inspiration to
guide the personality of the entire score. The composer was getting into
the habit of orchestrating his own small-scale scores at the time, and
he only needed to rely on trusted friend Steve Bartek to flesh out any
larger orchestral accompaniment, which in this case involved a 30-member
string section on a few cues. The core instrumentation includes guitar,
marimba, xylophone (key to the story), piano, accordion, and minimal
percussion, with the orchestral string section adding harp and a few
woodwinds at the periphery. A Mellotron machine is used by the
director's insistence in "On the Beach" for a dreamy echoing effect, but
otherwise the recording is purely organic.
Thematically, Elfman's constructs for
Restless
are sufficient but completely unmemorable, his phrasing wishy-washy and
emphasizing the tone of the performance rather than any melodic hook.
The "Weepy Donuts" cue (the title of which means nothing to this score,
of course) summarizes both the score's primary themes and serves as a
good representation of the work as a whole. Elfman fashions a main theme
out of rambling six-note phrases and three-note answers of vaguely
optimistic character, one that builds momentum during all of "Titles"
over bubbly ostinatos. It continues its friendly movement in "On the
Beach," adapts to a variant on guitar in "Hiroshima," delicately
meanders through "Morgue" on xylophone, and is barely recognizable in
"Happy Dead Girl." The theme turns brighter for keyboard over guitar bed
in "Battleship 2," carries a bit of
Real Steel drama in "The
Letter," and opens "Weepy Donuts" on guitar. Not much more obvious is
the composer's relationship theme, which consists of pairs of notes in
slight waltz rhythm for the friendship and more between the leads. This
theme is introduced tentatively on acoustic guitar in "Reconciliation,"
slightly elegant on piano in "Waterbirds," and returns in the middle of
"Weepy Donuts" on piano. It shifts to its most upbeat rendition on
xylophone over guitar in "Enoch's Goodbye." Individual diversions in the
score exist, led by marimba in hopeful, cyclical formations in "Meet the
Parents" that borrow from Carl Orff's "Schulwerk Volume 1: Musica
Poetica," which most film score collectors will recognize from its
emulation by Hans Zimmer in
True Romance. Spanish flavor to the
guitar in "Morning Affair" and "Death Scene" is a bit out of place, and
an odd accordion moment in "A Ghost" stands apart stylistically. The
most substantial ensemble cue is the anxious and slightly dissonant
"Parents' Grave," the only challenging moment in the work. Among the
score's better cues for the broader ensemble is "Death Scene," which is
actually a source piece. This and a handful of other cues would have
benefitted from a weightier presence by Elfman's music, as the whole of
his score for
Restless lacks much of a narrative journey to
reflect that of the film. The music is pretty even-keeled from start to
finish, neglecting opportunities to really emphasize the emotions of
particular scenes, especially late in the story. The score was only
released on a limited 2013 album by La-La Land Records, and its 34
minutes pass by pleasantly and anonymously. Even many years later,
Elfman had never provided a Van Sant movie with an orchestral expression
of full-ensemble gravity, and if any of their collaborations merited it,
then
Restless would have been a good candidate for such
extroversion.
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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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