A score written to keep a comedy moving
Aaron Zigman's work on The Ugly Truth is easy to miss, which is exactly how it is supposed to function
A film score that calls attention to itself has failed half its job. Aaron Zigman's music for The Ugly Truth (2009) sits so smoothly inside the comedy's rhythm that most viewers finish the film without consciously registering it — and that invisibility is structural, not accidental. Zigman is doing the work that holds the machinery together, telling the audience at every turn whether a scene is building, breaking, or resolving.
The grammar of a studio romantic comedy
Romantic comedy as a form has a fairly fixed architecture: setup, obstacle, escalation, collapse, reconciliation. The dialogue and the performances occupy that architecture visibly, but the score is what signals which phase the film is actually in at any given moment. Without it, an audience can mistake irony for sincerity, or miss that a scene has pivoted from antagonism to something warmer. Zigman's job on The Ugly Truth was to make those pivots legible without making them obvious — to underline without underlining.
He had done comparable work on comedies before, including The Holiday (2006), and the skill transfers directly. Light orchestral writing, piano-led cues, the occasional jump into something brisk and slightly absurd when the physical comedy demands it. The instrumentation never overwhelms because the scenes it supports are already loud — Katherine Heigl and Gerard Butler are both performers who fill a frame — and the music is calibrated accordingly: present enough to steer, quiet enough not to compete.
What the score actually does, scene by scene
The most reliable test of whether a score is doing structural work is to ask what changes when you remove it. In The Ugly Truth, the answer is: the turns become ambiguous. The scene where Abby and Mike's professional arrangement begins to shift in Sacramento is played with a certain amount of tonal ambiguity in the performances — which is the point, because neither character is supposed to fully admit what is happening. The music resolves that ambiguity for the audience ahead of the characters, telling the viewer what to feel a beat before the scene makes it explicit. That is the classic function of a score in a genre film, and Zigman executes it without drawing attention to the mechanism.
The comic cues work differently. When the film tips into broad physical comedy — most notoriously in the restaurant scene involving the remote-control device — the score leans into a slightly heightened, almost cartoonish register, giving the audience permission to laugh rather than wince. The tonal shift in the music is what separates a scene that plays as farce from one that might read as merely uncomfortable. Genre literacy, scored.
The tradition behind it
Romantic comedy scores have a particular lineage ↗, one that runs from the sophisticated orchestral wit of classic Hollywood through to the piano-and-strings grammar that Marc Shaiman established for films like Sleepless in Seattle (1993). Nora Ephron's films in particular set an expectation for this kind of scoring — emotionally present but never sentimental to the point of collapse — and Zigman's work on The Ugly Truth is legible against that tradition. It knows what it is and where it sits.
Aaron Zigman ↗ has a long list of studio credits, and the consistency across them is precisely this: he understands that the score's primary obligation in a genre film is functional. Meaning is delivered by the scene; the music confirms and clarifies. That is a craft position, not a modest one — it requires knowing how much to give and how much to hold back, which is a judgment the audience never consciously evaluates but always feels.
The result, in The Ugly Truth, is a film that moves. Scenes arrive, turn, and exit cleanly. The comedy lands where it is supposed to, and the emotional gear-shifts register without grinding. Most of that is the writing and the performances. Some of it — more than most viewers will ever notice — is the music.