October 2003:
I don’t blame Clint Eastwood a bit for having wanted to be one of the very few directors of importance to have scored one of his own films (has anyone else done it other than Charlie Chaplin?). Even if the results weren’t especially impressive, I admire him for trying. And I can’t imagine that he purposefully chose the idiom in which he worked–the glossy “symphonic score” beloved of film composers of the Thirties and Forties–in order to make Mystic River seem like an upper-middle-class cultural artifact. My guess is that he scored it that way simply because that’s the kind of film music with which he grew up, and with which he’s most comfortable.
That the results ended up being wholly inappropriate to the film in question is, of course, another matter…
(If it’s new to you, read the whole thing here.)