• Composed by Ramin Djawadi
• Lakeshore / 2017 / 49m

Idris Elba and Kate Winslet star in The Mountain Between Us, which doesn’t seem to feature a mountain between them – rather, they’re stranded on one after their plane crashes.  With a dog.  Heaven only knows if they fall in love with each other – it seems pretty implausible that they might, but I guess stranger things have happened.  An example of the stranger things that have happened comes in the opening track of this album, when Ramin Djawadi’s main theme starts playing and you wonder if you’ve put a Michael Nyman album on by mistake.  It really does start off as if Nyman himself may have written it, with the elegant piano and strings and cellular structure.  The six minute piece becomes more sprawling and less focused than the real thing would have been, but it’s a decent imitation and something genuinely completely different for this composer.

The rest of the album doesn’t quite live up to it – the second cue “Don’t Say Anything” is also excellent but after that it’s more of a mixed bag, with some soap opera-style dramatics and some very basic ideas which ultimately get spread rather thin.  The first half of the album is pretty dull (the one moment of “action” really very grating) but it picks up considerably later on, leading up to a genuinely touching finale “The Meaning of Life” (a pretty weighty subject, that).  The variations on the main theme peppered through the album don’t see it get much development, but it’s a nice tune and usually very pleasant to hear.  Some of the incidental moments seem rather perfunctory and could easily have been excised from the album, which seems to last longer than its 49 minutes, but all in all it’s a decent effort and I’m pleased to hear this composer do something so different and hope he gets to explore and develop this side of his musical personality more often in future.

Rating:
***
Decent romantic drama score

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