Films about suburban malcontent in America are hardly rare these days, but there have been such excellent genre entries in recent years (American Beauty is a bit showy, but still marvelous; and its flipside, In the Bedroom, is better still) that there is clearly still much mileage to be had from it.  Like those two films, The Chumscrubber comes from a debutant director (Arie Posin) and features a wonderful cast (Jamie Bell, Glenn Close, Ralph Fiennes, Alison Janney, Rita Wilson) but unlike them, it isn't scored by Thomas Newman, but instead the highly-unlikely figure of James Horner, taking a rare break from earnest, big-budget studio films requiring big orchestras.

This is very much at the other end of the budgetary scale, with Horner performing most of the score himself on synths and piano, sometimes accompanied by George Doering on both acoustic and electric guitars (not at the same time).  I suppose the most obvious thing to compare the score with would be Horner's own House of Sand and Fog (another truly wonderful film) but it's a different beast - that was a highly-effective score in the film, very beautiful, but which didn't work at all well on album - something which certainly isn't true of The Chumscrubber.

The most notable aspect is the main theme, a lovely, wistful piece played by a synthesised approximation of a clarinet, with a lovely feel to it - it's a beautiful piece.  It gets repeated several times through the comparatively brief score (about 35 minutes on the album) so you get plenty of times to hear it, but its appearances are never unwelcome.  The score's other notable aspect are the lengthy passages dominated by Horner's piano playing.  Of particular note is the gorgeous, seven-minute "Digging Montage", a rather melancholic and lovely piece.  This is followed immediately by "Parental Rift", which is unlike anything I've heard from Horner before, combining industrial electronic percussion with abrasive electric guitar solos; again, it's very effective stuff.

It's great to see Horner make a return to the kind of low-budget fare he has repeated scored well through his career.  He seems to be making a real effort to work on a wide variety of different films at the moment, and is doing well on all of them.  The Chumscrubber is pretty unique (if something can actually be "pretty unique", which I doubt) in his canon - the sticker on the CD cover proclaims it to be "From the composer of Titanic" but its wry, intelligent sensibilities simply couldn't be further away from the emotional barrage of that score.  It doesn't make for the best album because it does get a little repetitive even with the abbreviated running time, but it's fascinating to hear a score like this from Horner.