First Listen: Rachel Portman’s ‘Never Let Me Go’ Score Released On iTunes Early

After releasing the first extended scene from Mark Romanek’s “Never Let Me Go” earlier this week, Fox Searchlight continues its slow, methodical promotional roll out for the film by unveiling Rachel Portman’s score for the movie. While the official soundtrack won’t be available in record stores until September 14, it’s now available for download on iTunes.

As we previously mentioned, Portman’s score is quite lovely. Listening to the score in its entirety has only confirmed this. With song titles such as “Ruth’s Betrayal” and “The Worst Thing I Ever Did,” the lush and haunting score gives us a hint at darker tones of the film which have so far been absent from the romantic trailer and posters for the film. Portman’s compositions should work well with Adam Kimmel’s (“I’m Here,” “Capote”) cinematography as well as Romanek’s direction. After all, even the biggest detractors of Romanek’s previous only other film, “One Hour Photo,” have to admit that the film was exquisitely composed.

It has been a strange decade for Portman. After wrapping up the 1990s with Oscar nominations for her score for “The Cider House Rules” and “Chocolat” in 2000 to complement her Oscar win for 1996’s “Emma,” Portman spent the first half of the aughts providing the scores to big-name directors’ minor and largely forgettable work. It was during this time that Portman worked on a variety of projects, including Robert Redford’s “The Legend of Bagger Vance,” Jonathan Demme’s “The Truth About Charlie” and “The Manchurian Candidate” and Roman Polanski’s “Oliver Twist.” The second half of the decade saw Portman’s work languish on mostly forgettable films like “Infamous” (the non-Philip Seymour Hoffman Truman Capote film), “The Lake House” and “Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2.” It looks as if the composer will begin this decade better than she ended the last one. After her work on Romanek’s highly anticipated film, Portman is set to work on the score for the Robert Pattinson and Uma Thurman fronted Paris set period romance, “Bel Ami.”

Boasting a cast made up of a veritable who’s who of young British actors, including Carey Mulligan, Keira Knightley, Andrew Garfield and Sally Hawkins, supporting work by Charlotte Rampling, Nathalie Richard and Andrea Riseborough, plus a script from Alex Garland (Danny Boyle’s collaborator on the scripts for “The Beach,” “28 Days Later,” and “Sunshine”), “Never Let Me Go” will be making its North American debut this week at the Telluride Film Festival. A perfunctory plot summary is impossible without giving away any spoilers so it may be best to simply note that this was the film that made Spike Jonze cry. The film opens in select theaters on September 15th.– Tan Nguyen