• Composed by James Newton Howard
• Backlot / 72m

To anyone who lived in the United Kingdom before about ten years ago when it ceased publication (and in that long list of people you will find both myself and Paul Greengrass), News of the World was the title of the country’s biggest-selling newspaper; but this film is not what you might expect a Paul Greengrass movie with that title to be (which would be a cutting expose of the deep moral flaws exhibited by the paper’s various leaders) but is instead about a US Civil War veteran charged with transporting a young girl back to her last remaining family, years after she had been taken by native Americans as an infant.

Greengrass reportedly does not make life easier for the composers who work for him and he has worked with James Newton Howard for the first time on this one. Howard has scored some westerns before – most notably his wonderfully expansive Wyatt Earp, one of his best scores – but anyone who knows the films of this director will know not to expect anything quite like that for News of the World.

Indeed, for the most part Howard here seems to be scoring the earth rather than the wide open sky – it’s a frequently intimate score, low-key, and not literally using sounds of the wind as Marco Beltrami did in The Homesman but aiming for a similar effect in a slightly more conventional way.

The sad main theme is introduced in the opening “Captain Jefferson Kidd”, with a small string ensemble and solo fiddle; then towards the end of the second cue, “There is No Time for Stories”, a second, much more overtly beautiful theme emerges. If it sounds very familiar to you, rest assured you’re not the only one – it sounds for all the world like the chorus of Leonard Cohen’s ubiquitous “Hallelujah”, to the extent that the first time I heard it I thought it must be a credited interpolation of that melody into the score – but it isn’t, so I assume it is a coincidence. Anyway, it’s a (very famously) beautiful melody and is ravishing whenever it appears.

Not long later the score does go briefly expansive in the energetic “Arrival at Red River”, but after this it is calm for a lengthy period. It is not without beauty: little piano textures seem to twinkle above frequently-dark washes of strings underneath, there are delightful little feelings of nature from the occasional guitar or other soloist – but be prepared for it to be really very sad music, sometimes with awkward synth atmosphere, sometimes purely acoustic.

Howard has always been an elegant composer and there is elegance running all the way through this music – but I have to say it’s quite hard to fully maintain attention through the course of the very long album. It might betray me as a total pleb, but I just want more of it to sound like the fabulous, expansive “The Road to Dallas” which is as close as the score really gets to that vintage Hollywood western sound (while remaining unmistakable James Newton Howard).

In its occasional moments of more oppressive darkness, such as the lengthy “Dime Mountain” which takes that expansive theme I just mentioned and flips it round into a dark suspense piece, there is also treasure to be found. But they really are only occasional. I’ve already mentioned The Homesman and I think that score did a better job of building its organic-feeling but still appropriate-for-a-western sound world and making it interesting on album – this one would work much better were it half as long. The ambient music that dominates the middle section of the album could probably have been cut down to a single track to include something of that style, with the album focusing instead on the vintage Howard moments that crop up now and again.

As it nears its finale, the music does become more interesting once more – “Johanna Returns” is exquisitely beautiful, if deeply tragic-sounding. “A Gift” lives up to its name with some swooning strings, and “Kidd Visits Maria” offers an emotional, cathartic version of the main theme.

Really, despite its flaws as an album, there are some tremendous moments in the score (many of them summarised in the excellent end titles piece – so great to see Howard still bothering to write them, rather than relying on his music editor to paste something together) and as such any fan of the composer will want the album, even if they end up listening to it primarily as a much-condensed playlist. To be clear: there’s nothing wrong with any of it and I’m sure it works great in the film – it’s just so frequently low-key and sombre it’s not really the sort of thing I would listen to for entertainment, outside of its more thematic sections and its moments of greater scope and energy.

Rating: ***

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