Three names immediately come to mind when considering the most important film music composers of the 20th century. John Williams so obviously towers above everyone else, for reasons that require no explanation. If we’re going to rank, Bernard Herrmann has to be second, not only for his iconic work with Alfred Hitchcock (most notably, Vertigo, North by Northwest and, of course, Psycho), but also his towering scores for Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane and Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver. Coming in at a close third is Italian composer Ennio Morricone. He’s the subject of Ennio, a new-ish documentary by Giuseppe Tornatore (of Cinema Paradiso renown), one that premiered way back in 2021 at the 78th Venice International Film Festival but is just now getting a stateside release.
As a work of non-fiction cinema, Ennio is about as straight-down-the-middle and perfectly fine as it gets, with an important caveat (which we’ll get to). Tornatore mostly sticks to the chronological details of Morricone’s life (he died in 2020). Given its subject’s massive creative output – Morricone was so prolific, some critics (wrongly) doubted his hand-composed every score – Ennio mostly sticks to Morricone’s career, at least once it moves past the contours of his early years.
The problem with the film is its length: an inexcusable 155 minutes. Perhaps there are historical figures whose lives are so dramatically rich and inherently compelling that delivering two-and-a-half hours of content is a no-brainer. Morricone, alas, isn’t such a figure. Ennio plays out like an extended Wikipedia entry, with the man himself recounting his life and many, many other talking heads chiming in for good measure.
The inclusion of half of these well-wishers makes sense. We get commentary from big names like Clint Eastwood, Quentin Tarantino, John Williams, Hans Zimmer, Bernardo Bertolucci, Oliver Stone, Barry Levinson, Quincy Jones and Bruce Springsteen. We must also sit through interviews with almost a dozen professional composers, who over and over again wax poetic about Morricone’s brilliance, but whose names are probably unrecognizable to anyone outside of an Italian conservatory. As the movie stretches past the two-hour mark, an ugh-this-guy-again frustration begins to take hold.
As an appreciation of Morricone’s vast and innovative career, which also included non-film compositions that pushed the boundaries of experimentalism, Ennio is dutiful and comprehensive. The film’s first 40 minutes cover Morricone’s formative years growing up in a musical environment – his father was a professional trumpeter – where Ennio demonstrated prodigious talent early on. For fans of film history, things only start to get interesting once Morricone begins writing scores for Spaghetti Westerns (most famously, but not always, with Sergio Leone) and Italian giallo suspense pictures (most famously, but not always, with Dario Argento). We get the requisite survey of Morricone’s most famous scores: The Dollars Trilogy, Once Upon a Time in the West, The Battle of Algiers, Cinema Paradiso, Once Upon a Time in America, The Thing, Days of Heaven, 1900 and The Hateful Eight to name a few. Ennio’s commentators respectfully explain why these compositions are important to both music and film history. But this baggy encomium seems perfunctory and unworthy of its subject, for whom all involved clearly feel nothing but the highest reverence.
Photo courtesy of Music Box Films
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