I was quite tempted to compare Far From Heaven with Pleasantville, both deal with the facade society of the 50's, where everyone goes about their business keeping up a veneer of pleasantness to disguise anything murky or ill feeling. As the mayor in Pleasantville says, everything should be, well, 'pleasant.' However, Pleasantville was broadly speaking a satire, but it did benefit from a superlative Randy Newman score (perhaps the only other person who could have written something as good as Bernstein for this film), but Far From Heaven is a more serious melodrama. As a result, Bernstein's music is more straight laced than Newman's occasionally humorous edge. The opening track, Autumn in Connecticut (a beautiful sight, I assure you) sets the tone; Cynthia Millar's graceful performance of Bernstein's gentle piano led main theme is followed by one of the few surges in orchestral tone and the main theme is performed in all its lush glory.
After the opening flourish, the forces are largely smaller in scale, typically strings and woodwind in various combinations, but invariably with the piano weaving in and out. There are the couple of the more bouncy passages that Bernstein invariably includes, notably at the end of the opening track. A little jazz for Cathy and Raymond Dance and Miami is thrown into the mix for a pleasing change of pace. The more dramatic sections are, perhaps surprisingly, given quite an intense low end piano motif, most notably in Back to Basics, although the overall tone is of melancholy, but warmed by the typically sublime and low key orchestration.
For all the hype associated with the score, my expectations were perhaps a touch high. It is an absolutely charming score, but I feel to say it is one of Bernstein's best is veering toward hyperbole. I don't know why, but it just didn't click overall in the way his best efforts have done so, scores such as Frankie Starlight and To Kill a Mockingbird just feel that bit more accomplished. There are plenty of fine moments here and it has a deep emotional resonance throughout and shouldn't be passed up. Bernstein's music is almost always at a higher level of quality than most composing for cinema today. It a score that was written with great care and love, something rarely found in the film music written today, this is film music, as it used to be.
Rating ~ Total Time ~ 44:37
In a time when films and scores are often flashy and soulless, it is a joyous experience to find two gentlemen wanting to revisit a gentler age. One of them, director Todd Haynes was not of the period, but the other, Elmer Bernstein most definitely was. In the film music gentry, I don't think there is a greater figure than Elmer Bernstein. Even the other gentlemen of film music, Williams and Goldsmith, were not writing film scores in the 1950's, but at that time, Elmer Bernstein was cementing his career. For this reason, Todd Haynes felt that only Bernstein would be suitable for his film, what might be described as a fond homage - although more modern in its dealing with some of the themes of race and sexuality - to the melodramas of the time, but instead of a score written in the style of, Haynes has been able to hire the services of someone who has always written in a timeless style whatever the period of the films' production.
Arranged by Patrick Russ