Before the Oscars, I attended a thoughtful discussion of what it means to match music to motion pictures, courtesy of composer Alexandre Desplat, who was gracious enough to take to the piano and perform a few selections from his astonishing career in scoring movies at a Weinstein Company event at the Beverly Hills Hotel.
Desplat, whom I interviewed about his work and score during release of The King’s Speech, is nominated for tonight’s 2013 Academy Awards for his Philomena score which he explored and sampled in a room near the Polo Lounge. It was standing room only as the Frenchman talked about his distinguished career, including music for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, the role of melody and why he likes to integrate melancholy into each of his themes for film. He confirmed that his next project is scoring a remake of Godzilla. But Philomena was the main topic, with Desplat explaining how he brought the fairgrounds theme from the title character’s early indiscretion full circle into the rest of her lifelong journey and the old-age search to locate the child who was taken away. As always, he was honest, frank and tactful about Hollywood’s impossible process for making movies punctuated by proper music.
Dallas Buyers Club is a richly textured dramatization of one Texan versus the government in a dramatic showdown with life itself at stake in every moment. Mud is about what makes men from boys. 12 Years a Slave is Hollywood’s first serious film about American slavery taken in the measure of one man who is born free. It deserves the highest praise. Another picture about one individual’s odyssey into a dark, strange world will be honored tonight during a reunion of Judy Garland’s children including Liza Minnelli: The Wizard of Oz, which celebrates its 75th year. With Ellen DeGeneres hosting again, I do hope tonight’s Oscars do not repeat past affairs and instead toast with glamor to the best movies and moviemaking.
This 1945 motion picture, based on a novel and written and adapted for the screen by Ayn Rand, delivers lush romanticism in a movie with an implausible premise which nevertheless features excellent photography, writing and performances and exists as evidence of Ayn Rand’s ability to be objective as a writer.
Objectivity is not a small issue in a film based on a wacky novel, as Objectivist filmmaker Michael Paxton recently convinced an audience during a screening at OCON, about a woman with amnesia who struggles to find herself. Few writers are as soulful and poetic as Rand in writing about the epic quest to define, direct and make – and remake – oneself and Love Letters, co-starring Joseph Cotten and Jennifer Jones, is exceptional in this regard. The woman who would adapt the screenplay for her 1943 novel The Fountainhead four years later – an atheist who would describe herself as a radical for capitalism – works in a good bishop, gold as money and the Bible in a remarkable and curiously involving love story of a man and a woman whose love grows in letters during wartime.
When I first saw Love Letters in the 1990s, it did not strike me as Rand’s best work of art and having seen it again recently I still hold that view, though I appreciate it more than I did and see more clearly that it’s not her fault and the movie is a valiant effort. Shot in black and white, with a score that evokes for me the insistent score for the pirate film version of Rand’s first novel We the Living, Love Letters begins with a tale of two soldiers during World War 2. One (Cotten) writes the other’s love letters to a beautiful woman (Jones) with whom he predictably falls in love as she writes back. That’s the whole plot premise, really, and it’s wispy and predictable.
But it looks gorgeous, moves with grace and is accentuated by romantic music and Rand’s clipped, economical eloquence adds depth of meaning to what otherwise might have been a soggy, Forties melodrama. It turns out that the other soldier had returned from war to marry the young beauty only to end up murdered and the bride’s memory loss, presumably triggered by the trauma, makes her encounters with the man with whom she really fell in love both bittersweet and utterly impossible.
Of course, in fantasy, nothing is impossible so, here, too, gold sovereigns, a cat and a car going backwards fold neatly into what amounts to an irresistible plot-theme, as Ayn Rand coined the term, that no matter how young and reckless you can’t find happiness in another person and a real lover holds a mirror to your own ego and the best within, though Love Letters doesn’t frame it that way. But that’s what happens, in an English countryside with kind, decent people, malicious types and a scruffy dog, too, all observing or obstructing a man and a woman in love who don’t have access to all the relevant facts.
That fact and value are integrated in a picture story that feels at once light, deep and serious is an achievement made chiefly by Ayn Rand, who would go on to write the 20th century’s greatest novel, Atlas Shrugged, which introduced the world to her philosophy, Objectivism.
Love Letters is directed by William Dieterle. Costumes by Edith Head. From a novel by Chris Massie. Lee Garmes is director of photography. Score by Victor Young. Hal B. Wallis is producer.
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