The music of John Adams in I Am Love

Frustrating to have a good feeling about a film but be unable to confirm our gut instinct because it’s still in the protected pocket of limited release. We’ve posted as many relevant items as we can find about I Am Love (click the topic tags to find them), but it’s been hard to get a handle on what an exquisite thing of beauty it might really be. Three clips after the cut help to give us a sense. The music by John Adams is especially vibrant, and its unusual prominence on the soundtrack gives it a striking front-and-center emphasis. Such an opulent stylistic flourish is a risky artistic choice — reminds me of the shifts in color intensity in A Single Man — so it’s a good thing the decision seems to work brilliantly.

*[John Adams is a Pulitzer Prize-winning composer best known for purely orchestral works and several operas. I noticed that Scorsese used two of Adams’ standalone compositions on the soundtrack for Shutter Island — and a reader points out that this is the case for I Am Love as well. Adams music on the soundtrack are from pieces that were previously composed.]

This sequence knocks me out:

A.0.Scott and Michael Philips mention John Adams’ score in their painfully brief At the Movies segment. (Sorry, 85 seconds is a pitiful amount of time to allot to any movie, much less for the type of film that needs a leg up from critics.)