This was a tough score to write, mainly because the movie’s tone teeters perilously on the line between comedy and drama.  Often times I wanted to write music that would play the opposite in the scene: if things were getting too heavy, better to lighten the mood a little bit with some cute pizzicati.

The whole score is based around a single theme.  Here are some of my favorite cues:

Opening

Football

Steadicam shot of the hallway

Second steadicam shot of the hallway

Closing

Mulligan centers around an emotionally stunted 30-year-old loser, John, who can’t get past the fraught relationship he had with his father (now deceased).  He channels his emotions into a “pictorial epic” called Golfing with Apollo – a comic book in which the god Apollo serves as his own heroic alter ego.

Here’s the opening title sequence in which the main character feverishly draws, paints, writes and splatters his ideas onto the page.  There’s some really brilliant animation that goes along with this sequence:

Here’s the “Nostalgia” theme:

And here’s a later comic book scene that deals with reconciliation (hence the reappearance of the Nostalgia music):

There’s a mystery at the center of the plot, as John seeks to uncover the money his father secretly buried where only he (John) could find it, thus proving that he (the father) did love him (John) after all.  I’ll spare you the various “Spooky” cues as they go hunting for the loot and run into a variety of shady characters, but I will include the director’s favorite music, a cue called “Mystery”:

And here’s the composer’s favorite, the “Nostalgia Tarantella”, a delightful romp based on the Nostalgia theme: