After sitting on the shelf for a couple of years, Marc Forster’s White Bird has finally been released in the US, to pretty disastrous financial returns. A sequel to 2017’s surprise hit Wonder, it picks up the story of a seriously disfigured young man, now attempting to make his way in a new school, as his grandmother visits him to recount her tales of life in Paris during the Nazi occupation.

Thomas Newman, who scored Forster’s previous movie, the underrated A Man Called Otto, is nowhere near as prolific now as he approaches 70, but for White Bird he brings out what can only be described as his vintage sound and in doing so, provides one of the year’s film music highlights. While you may perhaps legitimately question whether the composer is staying too far within his comfort zone, frankly I’m just delighted to be able to bathe myself in such a luxurious style of music – one of the great film composers of his generation just doing his thing.

The score is anchored around a fairly simple main theme, but one which is so malleable Newman is able to use it to great effect in so many different ways. Early on the album, we hear it first in “Aubervilliers-aux-Bois”, featuring Newman’s trademark glittering, shimmering style; shortly afterwards in “Rose” he deploys the theme on solo piano, in a very pretty setting; and then in the brief “Dress Shoes” it’s given a grand, triumphant arrangement for the brass section which recalls the more playful moments of Scent of a Woman (and countless others).

It’s not all fun and games, however. The middle portion of the score is frequently rather dark and at times uncompromising – this section is introduced with the excellent “Stay Very Quiet Run Very Fast”, a lengthy cue which mixes dark suspense with at times pretty taut action material (not entirely dissimilar to Newman’s Bond scores). While my preference would have been to tighten up this section for the purposes of optimising the album listening experience (it runs almost 80 minutes – a tighter, hour-long presentation would perhaps have been better) there’s no denying its effectiveness. The score’s secondary theme reveals itself as being pivotal here – a set of variations on and developments from a four-note motif, usually for piano, it has an unsettling feeling in its default form but the composer cleverly manipulates it at times into a thing of beauty.

The wistful “Julien Beaumier” is a stunning piece, the composer’s exceptional writing for winds coming to the fore – while it is subtle and in no way flashy, it’s laden with such feeling; more up-front is “Days Weeks”, with its gorgeous darting flute solos, there’s magic in the air. And speaking of magic, midway through the score Newman introduces a new theme in the light, breezy “(Wonder Story)” – it’s so delightful, so upbeat and positive, a real highlight.

In the last 20 minutes or so of the album we are presented with a succession of sumptuous tracks as Newman reprises all of the score’s key thematic material. The Shawshank strings in “August 1944” are tremendously moving; “Vivienne” is a brief but gorgeous presentation of the main theme; in “The End of My Story” there’s a catchy kind of pop instrumental vibe which sandwiches a sadder passage, the composer displaying his unmatched deftness-of-touch to the full; “Vive l’Humanité” is as moving as a piece of music with that title must surely be, a stunning piece. And we ain’t done there – “White Bird” is probably the best cue of all, a wonderful reprise of the “(Wonder Story)” theme extended out to allow us to enjoy all of its facets and then the main theme, with choir, gets a similar treatment in “Songbird”. There’s even a vocal version of that theme to close the album, the film’s star Ariella Glaser lending her voice to the delightful “Little Bird”.

White Bird is so full of class: it has it oozing out of its every pore. It is the work of a master film composer four decades into his career, so inevitably there is a feel of familiarity to it – I wonder if it is actually that very familiarity that makes it so appealing. Yes, the album runs too long but even so it’s one of the year’s finest without question – I just want to keep playing it again and again, completely beholden to its many charms. Bravo Thomas Newman – this just might be my favourite of 2024 so far.

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