Monuments Men

Alexandre Desplat's name isn't familiar to most movie fans. But this engaging score for George Clooney and Grant Heslov’s unusual, true-life WWII adventure ably displays why the French film composer has become a trans-Atlantic filmmakers’ favorite; he has claimed six Oscar nods, as well as Golden Globe and GRAMMY® wins for The Painted Veil and The King’s Speech, respectively. Given a tale that effectively inverts The Dirty Dozen (a disparate band of art scholars and curators are tasked with securing European art treasures from the Nazis), Desplat underpins his mastery of orchestral timbre and far-ranging influences with seemingly prescient emotional restraint. He conjures a jaunty, triumphant title march that also serves as a recurring motif, before interweaving it with cues that effectively color the film’s geographical/historic dimensions and more introspective personal landscapes. Desplat folds it all into the extended, masterfully tempered orchestral “Finale” before Nora Segal closes the score with a warm a cappella rendition of the holiday classic “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.”