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Review of To Die For (Danny Elfman)

FILMTRACKS RECOMMENDS:

Buy it... if, frankly, you desire some of the songs in the film, because the 19 minutes of Danny Elfman's score sharing time with those songs on the album is as schizophrenic, bizarre, and casually unlistenable as anything the composer has ever written for the screen.

Avoid it... if you already own Elfman's second "Music for a Darkened Theatre" compilation featuring more than half of the same material and all of the score's highlights.

FILMTRACKS EDITORIAL REVIEW:

To Die For: (Danny Elfman) There are ten different ways from center that Gus Van Sant's 1995 film To Die For could be protested for indecency, and it's safe to confirm that it chronicles human behavior at its very worst. In a much acclaimed performance by Nicole Kidman, an aspiring anchor woman with limited intelligence and talent devises a plan to gain notoriety for herself through deception and murder. She marries the son of a mobster to ensure financial stability but eventually has to dispose of him because, awkwardly enough, he genuinely cares about her and wants to start a family. The woman seduces a youngster in the process of falsifying a news report about teens and he, along with a couple of his friends, carries out the murder. By mostly luck, she escapes prosecution from the law, but it's not long before the mafia discovers what she did and gives her proper treatment. Unquestionably, To Die For is a truly sick dramatic comedy, exposing the darkest corners of personality disorders with a wink of the eye. It was based on a novel that took inspiration from a real-life American case in which a school employee did actually seduce a teenager and convince him to kill her husband. Audiences really didn't want to see that story with all of Van Sant's twists, however, and after being screened out at the Cannes Film Festival, To Die For only managed to recoup its costs in a wide release. Kidman's monologues aimed directly at the camera, among other things, gave the film it's only representation at major awards. The project initiated a fruitful collaboration between Van Sant and composer Danny Elfman, who was in the process of expanding beyond his Tim Burton ties and accepting a wider variety of oddball assignments outside of the blockbuster scene. The assignment spoke purely to Elfman's quirkier side, and the composer later commented that To Die For was refreshing because it allowed him to explore musical avenues without genre boundaries. There really was no clear musical direction taken by the production as a whole; the songs selected for inclusion on screen (and then on album) are wildly schizophrenic, so Elfman, in a rather limited role in terms of contributed time, was allowed to meander through three really unrelated sounds to suit his own sense of humor. The resulting score is strangely fascinating, and its ingredients and demeanor are rooted firmly enough in Elfman's methodology to make it comfortably familiar, but it remains among the composer's only truly unlistenable works. For some Elfman collectors, this score symbolized a year in which the composer lost the "magical" appeal of his early writing.

Elfman chose to collide three basic elements in To Die For, and it is their interaction that makes the score so frightfully bizarre. Two of them deal with the split halves of the Kidman character's personality. On one side, you have the illusion of tenacious innocence and proper behavior as necessary by any aspiring new anchor, handled by Elfman with the official "Suzie's Theme." This piece recalls a plucky, perky 1950's environment with vocalized "ba-ba's" and light percussive elements that emulate the suburban lifestyle cues in Edward Scissorhands. By "Angry Suzie," this theme is joined by Elfman's typical skittish violin lines of the era. The other half of her personality is the one of both evil and allure, allowing Elfman to unleash some absolutely thrashing electric guitar performances in a few places. These two styles are forced upon each other in sonic battle during "Main Titles," the most famous piece from the score and the cue that features several outbursts of the heaviest metal elements you could imagine to accompany scenes of outrageous public fornication and other pleasantries. This 4-minute track on the album will truly turn your friends off of film music, but it is still highly amusing despite being practically impossible to casually enjoy. The third aspect of the score for To Die For is the quietly sickening suspense mode that Elfman enters to address the unraveling of the plot in its latter half. In "Murder!" and "Finale," Elfman begins to dissolve those two previous identities into a wishy-washy haze of troubled atmosphere, the once fanciful elements reduced to melancholy, atonal shadows of their previous glory. The "Finale" cue is perhaps the most interesting one for the learned Elfman collector; its treatment of the four-note motif opening the Suzie theme and fragmentation of the subsequent pieces of that theme are quite appropriate given her fate. More curious is Elfman's subtle clarification of a couple of motifs in this cue, one that takes the final progressions of the Sommersby theme (and hands them to somber xylophone) and another that dies out at the very end and features a significant portion of James Horner's ascension theme from Cocoon. Seemingly intermingled are pieces of nursery rhymes, making "Finale" a subtle highlight. Also meriting mention is the humorously-titled "Weepy Donuts," its sappy orchestral yearning punctuated by a lovely female vocal so eerie that it sounds like a theremin. Overall, the score cannot be recommended on its album, which combines 19 minutes of Elfman music with a very odd collection of songs from across time and genres. Instead, seek out Elfman's second "Music for a Darkened Theatre" compilation, which offers 11 minutes comprised of the first four cues and an abbreviated "Finale." On either album, the fun comes at the cost of sanity.  **

TRACK LISTINGS:

Total Time: 42:55

• 1. Main Titles (4:09) • 2. Suzie's Theme - featuring Little Gus & The Suzettes (1:41) • 3. Busted (2:00) • 4. Weepy Donuts (1:50) • 5. Creepy Creepy (0:50) • 6. Murder! (3:51) • 7. Angry Suzie (0:36) • 8. Finale (3:47) • 9. Wasting Away - performed by Nailbomb (3:03) • 10. Nothing From Nothing - performed by Billy Preston (2:34) • 11. All By Myself - performed by Eric Carmen (4:54) • 12. Sweet Home Alabama - performed by Lynyrd Skynyrd (3:37) • 13. Wings of Desire - performed by Strawpeople (4:48) • 14. Season of the Witch - performed by Donovan (4:54)

NOTES & QUOTES:

The insert includes no extra information about the score or 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 To Die For are Copyright © 1995, Varèse Sarabande and cannot be redistributed without the label's expressed written consent. Page created 3/15/10 (and not updated significantly since).