Affliction: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack

From AwardAnnals

Michael Brook’s score, with a wail of pain or a growl of wrath, is a plaintive evocation of the central character’s unsettled emotions, which he cannot bear, but must confront.

Reviews

Amazon.com

Hard to imagine, but Michael Brook’s score for Affliction is just as dark and probing as the Russell Banks novel this movie was based on. Using electric guitars and synthesizers, Brook (Heat, Albino Alligator) creates a haunting and dissonant soundscape that continues to unsettle even after the music is over. “Late Night Conspiracy” is a slow but methodical guitar run; “Night Flashback” hums with tension; and the frenetic drums on “Chase” and “Wade Goes Wild” raise the pulse rate. The Turtle Island String Quartet adds moody strings throughout, but this creepshow mostly relies on the otherworldly sonics of synths. All told, it’s sinister stuff. Beautiful, but unrelenting. —Jason Verlinde

Related works

Affliction

Russell Banks

• 1990 PEN-faulkner finalist
• 1989 NBCC–Fiction finalist
• Score: 12.4

Wade Whitehouse, divorced, estranged from his young daughter, spends his days as a well-driller, snow-plow operator, and policeman, his nights in a wind-swept trailer park. But when a union boss is killed in an apparent hunting accident near Wade’s home, and he is convinced that it is murder, he seizes the event as a chance to right many wrongs—unaware that as he unravels the mystery he himself will become unravelled. Soon his hunger for justice and self-respect become inseparable from a desperate violence.

Affliction

Paul Schrader

Paul Schrader’s Affliction, adapted from the novel by Russell Banks (The Sweet Hereafter), charts the slow descent of small-town sheriff Wade Whitehouse (a raspy, gruffly restrained Nick Nolte) into violence, the legacy of the corrupt love of an abusive, alcoholic father. The story ostensibly centers on a hunting death on the outskirts of town, but as Wade digs into what may or not be a conspiracy, his personal life spirals out of control. James Coburn, who deservedly won an Oscar for his mocking, sneering performance, is Wade’s father, who jumps…