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| Elfman |
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.
** @Amazon.com: CD or
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| Bias Check: |
For Danny Elfman reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.16
(in 85 reviews)
and the average viewer rating is 3.26
(in 146,662 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.
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The insert includes no extra information about the score or film.
