When the “Middle Europe” palace Chancellor Elena Vernham (Kate Winslet) presides over first appears onscreen in HBO’s miniseries , it looks more like a dollhouse than a stronghold. The impression—a too-big, too-square blot against a dwarfing mountain range—screams of uber-privileged playtime. Elena and her beta husband Nicky (Guillaume Gallienne) got the keys to the kingdom from Elena’s dead father, whose liver spots she now agonizes over in between spa sessions while he sits in a cryogenic chamber. She sings live in concert, terribly, and no one tells her. In each of her deceptively coiffed broadcasts, a weird statue of a giraffe that appears slathered in lead paint sticks out in the corner, her cold hard version of a plushy. As ’s Manuel Betancourt , first-time creator Will Tracy hasn’t always met his tyrannically ridiculous protagonist with an appropriately fanged script. But he finds an angel and example in Alexandre Desplat. The veteran French composer’s Rube Goldberg machine of a score calibrates perfectly to the black comedy’s devolution, elevating Tracy’s satire when it falters and lingering back when it hits without ever losing its own generated momentum. Desplat’s rich resume—he’s animated films by everyone from Wes Anderson to David Fincher to Stephen Frears, who directs many episodes—has equipped him to smoothly navigate the beats of a tragicomedy operating on a simultaneously massive and miniature scale. When Desplat prepared a score for the Oscar-nominated last year, he knew a grand soundtrack would only undercut the gravity of the open-water distance swimmers’ actual history-making feat. “If the
music would have been all the time singing over her, it would have just killed the reality of it,” Desplat told in November. “You have to believe in it. If the music becomes too much like a score, it sucks.” Desplat turns this technique inside out for , his first miniseries credit. Unlike Nyad, Elena is an infantile and coddled leader whose grandiose perception of her governance manifests as an obsessive relationship with her personal guard, Corporal Herbert Zubak (Matthias Schoenaerts), a skilled fighter she takes to calling a “cow.” The first night they meet, hours after Herbert wakes from a drugged slumber hurtling toward her dominion in an armored car, Elena slips him a note reading “ .” Zubak examines the sigil-emblazoned cardstock in the shadow of a stern portrait of Elena facing his new bed, and the irony is clear. He’s been living in her dream from the moment he arrived in this cardboard castle. Power exists to change hands. As Elena’s control slips and Herbert’s influence grows, Desplat expertly follows suit. Desplat’s mission to meet Tracy’s cast of characters wherever they land goes beyond basic etiquette (keep the conversation-driven scenes orchestra-light, let emotive tight shots speak for themselves, etc.). Desplat understands that plucky strings and clipped horns can communicate anxiety as deftly as slapstick, that timpani can underscore brutality as well as bunkum. Even ’s consistent main theme, which initially sets the bumbling tone for an administration beheld to Elena’s sheltered oddities, rings darker five episodes in, when “Freedom Commander” Herbert retreats into dream therapy with Elena and rebel forces approach their doorstep. Desplat’s greenness in miniseries scoring doesn’t come across as a disadvantage for ’s autocracy when considering his countless credits on films that weave reality with fantasy. Since making a name stateside with Jonathan Glazer’s 2004 nightmare —its own rickety staircase of distrust—Desplat has written scores to animate ’s Hogwarts, ’ Edwardian multiverse, and the ’s Texan retelling of the very birth of existence itself. He even handled . But the clearest line in Desplat’s history to is his long-standing partnership with Wes Anderson. Desplat first collaborated with Anderson on (2009), then scored (2012), (2014), (2018), (2021), and (2023). (The wide shots of Elena’s palace bear a strong resemblance to those of especially.) Anderson’s movies, however absurdist the plots can lean, live and die in their hermetic environments. His oeuvre is stuffed with so much detail it has become a sort of cultural shorthand for romanticizing the meticulous, the tedious, coats with brass buttons from knee to neck and tea sets containing dozens of fragile pieces. Over nearly fifteen years, Desplat’s experience meeting minds with Anderson has apparently pressure-trained the already quick worker in the art of refracting reality, capturing the divine absurd by taking the table settings seriously. Desplat knows how to tailor an orchestra to their setting, and his approach with seems to pay homage to the types of court musicians that soundtracked empires across Medieval Europe. When your livelihood is the benevolence of the castle, anything tongue-in-cheek occurs behind closed-lip, docile smiles. You’re busy eking out your existence performing for the mad
Queen. The essential reality base Desplat discussed has eluded ahead of its season finale on April 7. The script can’t always reckon with the countless time jumps and political logistics it introduces, and Tracy’s own grip on Elena’s world-within-a-world loosens as she loses public favor and her mind. In some cases, this pseudo-method directing might shine, but here it deflates the stakes Winslet valiantly attempts to establish. It echoes the grating territory Tracy’s 2022 film leaned into, that certain self-satisfaction of prematurely winking at your target before landing the joke. It’s a good thing, then, that Winslet finds an ally in Desplat. Like the drummer boy hyping up his soldiers towards a monumental and all-too-likely futile conclusion, Desplat leads from the background on . Perhaps it’s a lesson the series’ many nail-biting underlings could take comfort in: leave reality-building to someone with literal worlds of experience. Desplat might know best of anyone but Winslet: Elena’s determined delusion is only as interesting as it is airtight. Her people don’t need to buy the big dream, but everyone behind the scenes does.