ENNIO - Mark Reviews Movies

Ennio, Music Box Films

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Review by Mark Dujsik | February 8, 2024

By the end of his life at the age of 91 in 2020, Ennio Morricone had worked on the musical scores of more than 450 movies or TV productions. It was quite the prolific career for a man who, by his own admission in Ennio, considered composing for movies to be a lesser kind of work for a musician. Morricone eventually saw otherwise, and so did countless others, in significant part because of singular accomplishments of Morricone's six-decade-spanning career and oeuvre.

It's a testament to Morricone's output that director Giuseppe Tornatore, who worked with the late composer on many of his own films, has made a 150-minute documentary about the man that feels both comprehensive and as if it's only scratching the surface. The former feeling comes from the extensive span of the film's narrative, which covers Morricone's life from his childhood and his career until just before his death. The latter description isn't entirely fair, to be clear, because the documentary does go deeper than simply listing and highlighting Morricone's greatest hits. It delves into style and technique in a way that's so compelling that it feels as if the film could have done more in that vein.

Maybe that wouldn't have been the correct approach, though. This is ,after all, more a tribute to Morricone and less a dissection of composition. The fact that Tornatore sought out those who can speak with knowledge, intelligence, and clarity on the subject of Morricone's actual work shows how much the director respects and admires his collaborator's output. We can sense that throughout the film—and not just because everybody here, even a colleague who was a long-time skeptic of Morricone's decision to so latch himself to the movies, can't help but gush about the man's talent and cultural impact.

This documentary is clearly a labor of love—the result of obvious research, of using a filmmaker's connections in the best possible way, and of devoting some actual thought to how a biographical account of its subject should be handled. Yes, this is essentially a chronological narrative, but Tornatore picks and chooses which personal and professional details really matter to give us an understanding of Morricone as a person and an artist. No anecdote is wasted. No discussion of style is without merit. No testimony from famous filmmakers and composers comes across as hollow flattery.

Most importantly, Tornatore had access to Morricone himself, who speaks with the frankness and honesty of a man who has had an entire lifetime to reflect on his accomplishments, shortcomings, regrets, and resentments. Sitting in his home, Morricone describes the course of his life and career with ease and appreciation, even if he still seems to carry some of the old, darker thoughts of how colleagues and mentors overlooked or dismissed his work for screens. His teacher, a man whom Morricone deeply admired, referred to composing for the movies as an act of musical "prostitution," and if he ever changed his mind about arguably his most famous student, Morricone wouldn't have known.

In other words, again, this isn't a mere biography. Yes, we learn of Morricone's childhood, raised by his professional trumpeter father to learn the same instrument to make his own living, and how the composer refused to include trumpets in his own work until after his father's death, since the elder Morricone stopped playing as well at a certain point. Later on, Morricone describes writing a piece for a movie that was based exclusively on trumpets, and the connection doesn't need to be made.

Mainly, the narrative goes decade by decade, starting with Morricone finding initial success by arranging pop songs in a novel way that we now take for granted and breaking into the movie industry. His breakthrough, of course, would be his collaborations with Sergio Leone on the filmmaker's Spaghetti Westerns of the 1960s, and if one believes in anything like destiny, there's the odd coincidence that the two men were childhood classmates but didn't know it until after they agreed to work together. Other filmmakers wanted Morricone to replicate what he did on those films, but he refused, evolved, and more or less came to define the changing times of film scores.

Those are the basics, but for context, Tornatore brings in assorted directors (including Bernardo Bertolucci, Dario Argento, Kar-Wai Wong, Roland Joffé, and, for one of the film's more amusing examples of how stubbornly individualistic Morricone could be, Oliver Stone) and musicians, from stars like Bruce Springsteen and Joan Baez to other well-known score composers such as Quincy Jones, Hans Zimmer, and John Williams. They don't simply discuss the man's wider influence, either, because they all know what specific qualities Morricone brought to their respective films or to his music on a more general level.

They're almost as excited to talk about the work as Morricone himself is, although that's probably impossible. The composer shows as much passion for his decades-old compositions and knowledge of his method in these interviews as he must have had while furiously writing them. The man knew music, and his way of so plainly but knowingly communicating it here might be why Morricone's work has endured for so long—and will certainly continue to do so for the foreseeable future and likely beyond.

On that note, it's strange but somewhat admirable that Ennio doesn't take an elegiac tone. We may have lost the composer, but his music is still here, as a living, thriving testament.

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