Life as a House: Original Motion Picture Score

While Irwin Winkler's bittersweet film constructs a touching allegory--Kevin Kline's character is diagnosed with terminal cancer and sets about both salvaging a relationship with his estranged son and building the house of his dreams--it's also the kind of story that requires a deft musical touch, one that embodies a sense of buoyant optimism even as it heads toward the dramatically inevitable. Alternating between vibrant, rhythmic passages carried largely by mallet instruments (and resembling a more structured take on similar Tom Newman cues) and the melancholy of his quietly effective writing for strings and solo piano, Mark Isham's score strikes an almost perfect emotional balance amid a minefield of potential bathos. It also fuses some of the composer's modern minimalist composing instincts and spacious sense of dynamics with the more traditionally pastoral, resulting in emotionally introspective music that is considerably more than the sum of its parts. --Jerry McCulley