Dave Grusin's piano score; the name Mitch McDeere; the Cayman Islands as a locale; nineties Cruise; the cast as a whole; the Memphis setting; the foresight in casting future character actors
The soundtrack, controversial at the time, has aged the best: Dave Grusin's piano is a character in itself, adding humor, melancholy, romance and suspense, recurring in themes such as the guitar on Beale Street and the drive by the river, and it puts Grusin on the Who Won the Movie list; it is called one of the best scores of the last twenty-five years and was Oscar-nominated, though polarizing when released.
Mitch McDeere is a great name; the Cayman Islands have always aged well as a mysterious locale; nineties Cruise is a peak era, and the hosts miss having an actor you buy season tickets for, floating Emma Stone, Miles Teller, Damon and Leo.
The totality of the cast and the Memphis setting, an emptied, fading southern metropolis, have aged well; on rewatch Mitch and Abby are themselves idiosyncratic, a self-made striver and a more moneyed wife, which reads as a Clinton-era, sell-out-or-not story that David Rabe and Robert Towne were obsessed with.
The character-actor foresight has aged well: Dean Norris and Tobin Bell as the two assassins before Breaking Bad and Saw, Terry Kinney before Oz and Billions, and Margo Martindale as the secretary, classic Pollack casting where the eighteenth most important person is a great actor.
