Road to Perdition: Music from the Motion Picture
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| Artist(s) | Thomas Newman |
|---|---|
| Subtitle | Music from the Motion Picture |
| Label | Decca U.S. |
| Honors | |
| Director Sam Mendes’s much-anticipated follow-up to his Academy Award®-winning American Beauty found him exploring the period gangster film—but with a moral fiber and undercurrent of family tragedy familiar from his Oscar® triumph. As he did with Beauty, Mendes again wisely entrusts the film’s music to Tom Newman, a composer with an instinctive knack for getting inside a film’s characters via innovative and often orthodox methods. As many of Newman’s preceding scores have been rhythmically driven and rife with… | |
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Director Sam Mendes’s much-anticipated follow-up to his Academy Award®-winning American Beauty found him exploring the period gangster film—but with a moral fiber and undercurrent of family tragedy familiar from his Oscar® triumph. As he did with Beauty, Mendes again wisely entrusts the film’s music to Tom Newman, a composer with an instinctive knack for getting inside a film’s characters via innovative and often orthodox methods. As many of Newman’s preceding scores have been rhythmically driven and rife with improvisation-driven experimentalism, its good to hear his equally distinctive writing for orchestra largely take center stage here again. But Newman’s inquisitive musical instincts can’t be denied, and his melancholy string writing is leavened first with subtle uilleann pipe flourishes that echo the characters’ Irish-American roots, then with savory, yet ever-restrained touches of his own ethnic-defying instrumental color and rhythmic accents. It’s another moody and introspective gem, seasoned with some lively period jazz (courtesy of the Charleston Chasers, Fletcher Henderson and his Orchestra, and Chicago Rhythm Kings) and a warm, final surprise: a duet of John M. Williams’s autumnal title track performed by none other than stars Tom Hanks and Paul Newman. —Jerry McCulley
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In Road to Perdition, Tom Hanks plays a hit man who finds his heart. Michael Sullivan (Hanks) is the right-hand man of crime boss John Rooney (Paul Newman), but when Sullivan’s son accidentally witnesses one of his hits, he must choose between his crime family and his real one. The movie has a slow pace, largely because director Sam Mendes (American Beauty) seems to be in love with the gorgeous period locations. Hanks gives a deceptively battened-down performance at first, only opening up toward the very end of the film, making his character’s…
