Beloved: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack
From AwardAnnals
| Album: | Beloved: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack |
|---|---|
| Artist: | Rachel Portman |
| Genres: | |
| Label: | Sony |
| Find it: |
|---|
Reviews
Amazon.com
It makes perfect sense that Beloved, Jonathan Demme’s adaptation of Toni Morrison’s acclaimed novel, brims with haunting and mysterious melodies. This is, after all, a story about the repercussions of slavery. Native American flutes and African percussion permeate Rachel Portman’s score, as do the haunting vocals of Oumou Sangare. The powerful yet sparse contributions from the Malian vocalist give the disc heavenly atmospherics, while the music—though ponderous at times—brims with intensity. “Cincinnati Streets” and “Vaccine” both feature a frantic patter of percussion, while “That’s Ohio” features fragile string arrangements giving way to the gorgeous harmonies of the African Children’s Choir. These somber global sounds are both beautiful and compelling. Yet another scoring gem from Portman. —Jason Verlinde
Related works
At the center of Toni Morrison’s fifth novel is an almost unspeakable act of horror and heroism: a woman brutally kills her infant daughter rather than allow her to be enslaved. The woman is Sethe, and the novel traces her journey from slavery to freedom during and immediately following the Civil War.
Woven into this circular, mesmerizing narrative are the horrible truths of Sethe’s past: the incredible cruelties she endured as a slave, and the hardships she suffered in her journey north to freedom. Just as Sethe finds the past too painful to remember, and the future just “a matter of keeping the past at bay,” her story is almost too painful to read. Yet Morrison manages to imbue the wreckage of her characters’ lives with compassion, humanity, and humor.
Part ghost story, part history lesson, part folk tale, Beloved finds beauty in the unbearable, and lets us all see the enduring promise of hope that lies in anyone’s future.
