Lawrence Kasdan’s The Accidental Tourist is a mature film, ostensibly a romantic drama but ultimately quite a moving study of grief. William Hurt and Kathleen Turner play a couple unable to cope with the death of their son, leading to their separation; he goes on to meet a very different type of woman played by Geena Davis and they form a bond, complicated when Turner’s character returns onto the scene.
Back in 1988 John Williams seemed an odd choice to score this film. At the height of his Boston Pops conducting fame, he was generally restricting himself to scoring only one or two pictures a year, and these were mostly Steven Spielberg films or ones which required “big” music (often both). Likely a conscious effort by the famed composer to move back to the kind of smaller picture he had scored earlier in his career (but a considerably better one than most of them had been), it offered him a chance to do something genuinely different.
The relatively short score – played by a relatively small orchestra, augmented with an unusually high (for Williams) electronic element – is based around a single theme. Every review of the music notes this, including the one that I wrote way back when. But Williams being Williams, there’s an awful lot to this theme – split into three distinct parts, used in different combinations (and occasionally heard simultaneously!) the composer sends it through enough variations that it doesn’t come close to becoming stale across the 42-minute album.
While the A section (the most commonly-heard) is arguably as sweet and lovely a melody as the composer’s ever written, light and airy and often heard for solo flute or piano, there is certainly a sadness to it at times – and perhaps even more so to the B section, usually cast in a melancholy glaze. The C section is a short motif more overtly associated with the grief at the heart of the story.
The music dances from the speakers, covering a wide emotional range, and it is wonderful to hear the way Williams develops everything through the album. Much of it is very restrained: subtle accompaniment to sometimes-difficult moments, glances of beauty sometimes shining through. In the rare moments he isn’t exploring one element or other of his main theme, the music tends to take on more of an atmospheric role, instrumental textures gently suggesting feelings.
All of those feelings finally get released in the dazzling romantic fantasy “A Second Chance”, subtlety now abandoned (it actually concluded both sides of the original vinyl album, and maintains its place as both track six and track twelve on the CD). Here the orchestra swells so beautifully but the focus is still on various beautiful textures provided by different soloists – piano, oboe, harp – it is a piece filled with such joy, such hope.
When you’ve got Star Wars and Indiana Jones and E.T. and Harry Potter and all the rest, it’s not surprising that something like The Accidental Tourist doesn’t often get a mention. Of all of Williams’s smaller-scale, more romantic works I think it’s the finest: an album that has such an appealing lightness to it, always such a pleasure to listen to.
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