: (Danny Elfman) Actor Emilio Estevez
struggled throughout his career to transition into the role of writer
and director, and that journey got off to a very rocky start with his
earliest such endeavor, 1986's
. A Robin Hood-inspired tale
of crime with the intent to help the poor, Estevez stars as a
disillusioned young man who cannot hold down a job and decides to help
the financially crippled population by attacking the loan records of
banks. He and his girlfriend, played by real life partner Demi Moore,
end up fugitives involved in shootouts as they seek to flee to Canada.
Their plight has a bloody end, though the story suggests in an
unsatisfying conclusion that the whole thing was just a dream. The movie
was heavily criticized for promoting violence in youngsters faced with
difficult family and work situations, and the experience even dissolved
Estevez's relationship with Moore. The financial flop is a good lesson
about how not write a script and shoot a film if you're a total
newcomer. Some of that same lesson applies to the film's workmanlike
score by Danny Elfman, who was just branching off from his Oingo Boingo
exploits to truly embrace the film scoring profession by 1986. Although
he had tackled a pair of ridiculous comedies with an orchestra by this
point,
represented a completely different kind of project
for him, and it was a type that he found himself more attracted to in
the years to come. Unfortunately, Elfman's lack of experience and
relatively poor selection of equipment left him at a disadvantage that
causes the end result in
to sound badly dated and poorly
refined. That amateurish electronic sound, which many considered an
asset in the intentionally schlocky
years earlier,
simply didn't translate effectively to a crime drama like this one.
Rather than rely upon any of his Oingo Boingo colleagues for
Without really good synthesizers and tasked with
generating 80 minutes of music from his home, Elfman considered the
assignment a worthy but laborious challenge. With only a minimal use of
sequencers to assist in generating the layers in his recording, the
composer was left attempting to perform on keyboards that he had never
considered his strongest capability. His approach ultimately met the
minimum standards for the film but was strongly influenced by others in
the arena at the time, making this music mostly a "don't screw it up"
kind of result from a composer learning on the job. With only the
synthesizers providing all the instrumentation of
Wisdom, he
employs emulations of common wet marimba tones, bass thumps, drum kit,
and fake wind and high brass that were typical to the era. The electric
guitar portions of the score are less heralded because they do not
appear on the score's longstanding album release. Stylistically, Elfman
clearly sought guidance from the preceding works of Harold Faltermeyer,
James Horner, and Tangerine Dream, with different sections of his score
borrowing elements of each. From Faltermeyer, it's the
Beverly Hills
Cop bass keyboarding. From Horner, it's the brash
Commando
percussion. From Tangerine Dream, it's the more ambient atmospheres.
Those styles are not bad in and of themselves, but their renderings
sometimes were, and how Elfman chooses to apply them is not effective.
Sadly,
Wisdom is a mechanically perfunctory and totally lifeless
score, with no substantive synchronization points or meter changes
within cues. There are hints of Elfman's own, early 1980's style in the
obnoxious riff at the outset of "The Mirror." The action material is
particularly grating, the slapping drums and marimba effects of Horner
origins distracting in "The Big Heist." Some cues consist of almost
entirely percussion-only rhythm-setters, such as "The Face Off" and
"Karen Bites the Bullet." Slurring electric guitar techniques really
emerge in "Heist Part Two." Dissonance is relatively rare but factors
late in "Close Call in Albuquerque" and "The Shootout."
Elfman's lone main theme for
Wisdom is based on
the structures of the "Home Again" song performed by Oingo Boingo for
the end credits. It's a truly weird, halting, uncertain, and unengaging
theme, with very little propulsion to it. It has several underlying
riffs established most extensively in "Change of Life." The melody forms
its own cyclical riff on xylophone effects at 1:24 into that cue as
well, but the highest lines in "Change of Life" aren't really aligned
with the theme. Introduced fully at 0:18 into "The Mirror" and
meandering through the rest of the cue, the main theme dabbles on top of
the jungle-appropriate rhythmic loops of "The Passion of Wisdom,"
becomes lazy in the background under marimba rhythms in "Job Search,"
and is accelerated with a bit of optimism in "Close Call in
Albuquerque." It's keyboarded with more contemporary style in "Trouble"
and joined by the primary riff as an interlude, but that more palatable
sound is boiled down further in the contemplative and accessible "Wisdom
Phone Home." It becomes very slow but slightly more tonal on those
keyboards during "In the Desert" as well. The lead riff guides
atmospheric choral haze in "Finale" before the theme joins on trumpet
shades. Elfman elongates and smoothens the theme into a harder rock
approach in "Main Titles" as something of a diversion. Finally, the main
theme is both the introductory riff and main vocalized core of the "Home
Again" song for the credits, and because the melody is so awkwardly
structured, it's difficult for Elfman to perform with lyrics and, sadly,
yields a song that is just not very good. In the end,
Wisdom
basically accomplishes what it needed to, but it's neither interesting
nor unique. The composer thrives upon creativity, and this work is so
derivative of others in the industry at the time that it's almost
completely devoid of the charm and appeal of even Elfman's most
challenging scores of the mid-1980's. The score was released on
identical CD and LP record options in 1988 by Varèse Sarabande,
and it was never expanded upon since. There is a significant amount of
music missing from that product, including the guitar portions of
character significance in the context of the story, but it's doubtful
that more of the remainder will improve the listening experience.
** @Amazon.com: CD or
Download
| 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.
|
