Customer Reviews

Far from Heaven (Score)

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

In contrary to the other readers' opinions, I found Bernstein's score a real 'charmer'. It sounds very 50s, and is deserving of the glowing accolades it has received in the media. This score is one of my favourite Elmer Bernstein scores. The quality of this score leaves modern scores for dead. If only film music would return to the golden -silver era once again. If this score doesn't get an Oscar nomination, I'll be very disappointed.

Peter..

50 years in the business and still on the top of his game...Elmer Bernstein has written a flawless masterpiece with Far from Heaven. Harkening to a more or less innocent time and to his own score for To Kill a Mockingbird, Bernstein has provided us score-fans with what is as of yet the best score of 2002.

Amazing.

Like Douglas Sirk ("All That Heaven Allows"), whose lush Technicolor weepies served as inspiration, director Todd Haynes ("Poison," "Safe") doesn't define melodrama as "overdone" or "overblown," but according to its strict Latin components: as a union between music ("melos") and drama. Accordingly, he hired one of Hollywood's most respected composers, Elmer Bernstein ("The Sweet Smell of Success," "The Man With the Golden Arm"), to provide the all-important soundtrack for "Far From Heaven."

In the film, fashionable homemaker Cathy Whitaker is played by a blonde Julianne Moore. Dennis Quaid, in his "comeback" role, plays her ad exec husband, Frank, while Dennis Haysbert (the president on TV's "24") is Raymond, the sympathetic black gardener Cathy turns to when her picture-perfect life starts to come undone.

The score begins and ends with a similar cue; both "Autumn in Connecticut," where the film is set, and "Beginnings" rely on piano for most of their emotional impact. The distinctive--but never overbearing--cue is repeated throughout, with other instruments, like violin, coming to the fore. There are a few playful detours along the way. "Cathy and Raymond Dance," for instance, appears to be a riff on "As Time Goes By," while "Miami" has a light samba feel.

Like the film, Bernstein's score doesn't parody 1950s melodramas, but evokes the genuine article, and "Far From Heaven" ranks among his best work.

I was really sad to hear earlier this year that Elmer Bernstein died. He was amazing and this soundtrack is very good proof. This music is some of the most beautiful I have ever heard and it MADE this movie. It may sound at first a little cheesy, but once it grows on you and you understand the context of the film, you will love it.

I started listening to this CD about a week before seeing the film and I felt then that it stood very firmly on it's own. Having seen the film, I now have this playing in an endless loop on my Walkman and it is absolutely gorgeous. It's one of those rare film soundtracks that actually plays as the soundtrack to one's life while you listen to--I lose myself in it constantly. Bernstein and Haynes are working toward the same end, with slightly different means--where Haynes uses style to create distance so that the emotion of the story is controlled, Bernstein rears back from the big emotional moments and takes us on unfamiliar, unexpected detours that locate the uncertainty of the central character. When the big themes do arrive, it's a stunner. What I love are the character motifs throughout, in particular Cathy's theme, that survives and endures and emerges under the final piece, small, fragile but still heroic. In contrast to something like The Hours, this is subtle and, at times, ambiguous. As Haynes said recently, "I like films that make me think." This score doesn't tell you what to feel; it deposits you in a place that is uncertain, transitory and constantly shifting. Just...y'know, a classic.

I heard the music before I saw the film, because I knew Elmer Bernstein a lot by now, and I very much admired him. For this film, Elmer went back to his early years of film scoring, and wrote a very much 50s-ish score. Full of longing, sadness, a sense of companionship, and other things that I'm unable to write down. Performed with luscious beauty by the Hollywood Studio Symphony, and with wonderful piano solos by Cythina Miller, it is no doubt vintage Elmer Bernstein. I was even more interested to notice that the orchestra was made up of only 53 players, a number that is not always used with movie orchestras today, which would explain why you could hear the sound so clearly, and notice every single instrument in the studio. I was very disappointed during the Oscars to see Elmer lose, because he very much deserved a second Academy Award. Now, he's dead. I was completely upset when I found out, especially when I realized that this was his last film (unless he did another since this film was made two years ago, please point out if I'm wrong). This soundtrack will take you back to the days when Elmer was young and just beginning.

At first, I didn't give full attention to this new song. I didn't care because the artist is from foreign. When my friend played the player, and when I heard the first line of the song, the music carried me to the 1950's.

Althoguh I was born in 1981, but, the music got inside your veins and put you into trance to feel the essence of life.

Elmer Bernstein's score for 'Far From Heaven' comes into life based from his experiences, if I am not mistaken. And no wonder, Heaven is destined for an Academy Award nomination.

I would agree that it is very reminiscient of the 50s scores you use to hear alot. I think it is goregous and suits the movie very well!! I highly recommend this soundtrack!!!!

This is the last score of Bernstein and the best one since the times of his 50' and 60'hits. He found here his more genuine inspiration and his more authentic vein of great composer. A masterpiece not to be missed.

The Oscar-nominated score by Elmer Bernstein, is so compelling, I now want to see the movie, too. The music evokes the long-lost melodramas of the 1950s and earlier, when scores were like a good paradox: Both sweeping and understated at the same time.

Bernstein's work here, with frequent collaborator Cynthia Millar, is evocative of some of his best work and other composers from the 50s without being overly hokey or anachronistic. It holds up fine as a score in 2003, too.

Good stuff for any fan of film or period music.