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Review of Restless (Danny Elfman)

FILMTRACKS RECOMMENDS:

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.

FILMTRACKS EDITORIAL REVIEW:

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.  ***

TRACK LISTINGS:

Total Time: 34:15

• 1. Titles (2:41) • 2. Battleship (1:09) • 3. Reconciliation (1:26) • 4. Sorry for Your Loss (1:54) • 5. Waterbirds (1:43) • 6. Meet the Parents (2:20) • 7. On the Beach (2:09) • 8. Hiroshima (1:06) • 9. Morning Affair (1:33) • 10. Morgue (1:18)

• 11. Crime Scene (2:45) • 12. Death Scene (2:06) • 13. Happy Dead Girl (1:11) • 14. Battleship 2 (1:50) • 15. A Ghost (1:00) • 16. The Letter (1:34) • 17. Parents' Grave (1:49) • 18. Weepy Donuts (3:31) • 19. Enoch's Goodbye (1:21)

NOTES & QUOTES:

The insert includes a list of performers and detailed information about the score and film.

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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 Restless are Copyright © 2013, La-La Land Records and cannot be redistributed without the label's expressed written consent. Page created 11/25/24 (and not updated significantly since).