So last night I watched The Wizard, the 1989 feature-length Nintendo commercial featuring Fred Savage as the older brother of a traumatized kid who performs superhuman feats of video-game prowess by exploiting continuity errors. The film harbors innumerable delights—not the least of which is Jenny Lewis of Rilo Kiley talking about Nintendo games as if she’s Fast Eddie Felson—but its soundtrack, characterized by a subtly strange overuse of New Kids on the Block, doesn’t have much to offer. And this is a shame, because a film with so distinct and unnerving an atmosphere as The Wizard should really have the music to back it up.

To explain: though the film follows the time-worn road-movie template, it eschews the lighthearted catastrophe of Hope and Crosby—whose predicaments were mostly caused either by goofiness on their own part or by serendipity, and rarely by the malice of a third party—for a plot driven entirely by the amoral viciousness of everyone in the world who is not Fred Savage, Jenny Lewis, or the continuity kid. The kids are pursued by a psychotic bounty hunter; beaten up and robbed by teenagers who seem awfully proud for people who have just victimized ten-year-olds; beaten up and robbed by farmers for $20, and, at the climactic video-game competition, subjected to a hyperactive announcer who snarls things like “come up here, my little munchkins.” The atmosphere of claustrophobic meanness is as cynical an indictment of American mercantilism as anything in Wall Street, and the fact that this is all happening to little kids only adds to the ghoulishness. So the tossed-off reverb anthems with which The Wizard’s montages are drenched are utterly inappropriate—what should be scoring Fred and Jenny’s misadventures is stuff like “The Libertine,” Patrick Wolf’s mini-suite for piano and unease; or Smog’s “Bathysphere,” which despite being overshadowed by its famous album-mate “Prince Alone in the Studio” is one of Bill Callahan’s most haunting and darkly funny seacliff dirges, and would fit perfectly over the opening credits: “when I was seven, I asked my mother to take me to the bay and put me on a ship … when I was seven, my father said to me ‘You can’t swim,’ and I never dreamed of the sea again.” Tempering one’s knack for grim melodrama with realistic restraint is the key to making portentious music without slipping into Fear Factory territory, and it’s what makes these songs good—Wolf’s sonics rage, blow, and crack their cheeks, but never slip from his assured grasp, and Callahan’s utilitarian Krautrock does exactly what is necessary to support his lyrics.

Still, the movie isn’t all bleak. Fred and Jenny do win at the end, and Continuity Kid lays to rest some ghosts of the past, but there’s a strange, unresolved melancholy to The Wizard’s ending, one that’s hard to notice with all the life-affirming wailing going on. One wonders what would happen if the final shot—of the kids riding into the sunset in the back of a pickup truck—was re-edited to be set to Okkervil River’s “The Velocity of Saul at the Time of His Conversion,” whose strangely metallic warmth finds an equilibrium point: not teary enough to make its grandeur seem cheap, nor grand enough to detract from its tears. At first glance there’s little to distinguish this from every other soaring sad-boy ballad on teen-movie soundtracks, but the deftness is in the details: in the band’s refusal to repeat the swirling ear-candy chorus any more than absolutely necessary; in the simplicity of the instrumentation, which eschews timpani and bawling strings for simple, foregrounded acoustic guitar and gentle dark-ocean organ; and, best of all, in the bit at the end with the spaceship. If “The Libertine” and “Bathysphere” are eighth-grade pseudo-darkness done right, “The Velocity of Saul at the Time of His Conversion” is melancholy done right, and melancholy is very, very hard to do right. If The Wizard had faded to black with this, the movie’s weird, shivery undercurrent might have been brought to the fore, its bleak desert landscapes might have come to seem symbolic, the dystopian malice of its goblinlike characters might have looked less like an accident, and maybe—just maybe—The Wizard, too, might have been done right.

Wait, no. Some things can’t be saved.

[buy stuff here / here / here]