Ennio

 An argument can be made that Ennio Morricone was the greatest composer of classical music working in the last half of the 20th century.  It's now increasingly apparent that the romantic style, fused with modernist influences, fled from the concert hall to movie theaters around 1935 with the influx of German Jewish composers to Hollywood -- composers like Erich Korngold, Franz Waxman, and Bernard Herrmann, who was a New York Jew but steeped in the German classical tradition.  Film scores made by these composers, and their progeny in Hollywood, sound like Strauss with tints of Stravinsky and, even, Schoenberg.  Morricone, who was Italian, was also educated in the classical tradition; I'm not qualified to judge these subjects, but there are many who feel that Morricone should be ranked with Mozart and Beethoven and that history will, in fact, yield this evaluation, although, perhaps, on the basis of artificial intelligence analysis two-hundred years from now.  In fact, I think Ennio Morricone is better equated to J. S. Bach -- Bach composed for the occasion; he had to write a cantata every week or so as well as masses, religious hymns, and all sorts of other Gebrauchsmusik (that is, music for practical use).  Bach had to recycle themes and borrow from himself and others; Morricone is compelled by similar exigencies to also re-use musical themes and motifs developed for one film into scores for other other movies.  In the year 1970, when Morricone composed his majestic score for Gillo Pontecorvo's Burn!,  this was among 28 other movie soundtracks that he had also written during that same 12 months.  (Morricone seems acknowledge the affinity with Bach; he notes that one of his scores is signed, like Bach's Art of the Fugue with the musical initials of the composer:  B-flat - A - C and H -- that is, the old notation for B natural.)

Giuseppi Tornatore's Ennio (2024) is an inordinately long and mostly unsurprising and uninformative documentary about Morricone. The film is wonderful primarily because of Morricone's music which is performed at length, either in concert settings or, more indelibly, as sound and image inextricably and gloriously linked in clips from the movies that the composer scored.  The breadth, subtlety, and expressiveness of Morricone's compositions is astonishing -- he could work in all genres.  It's characteristic of his scores that they all sound different and are intricately devised to accompany and, even, form the images in the films for which he wrote, but, at the same time, somehow all bear his signature sound.  (Hans Zimmer, one of the movie's innumerable "talking heads", says that you can hear Morricone's personal style in the first note played in any one of his scores -- this is an exaggeration but I understand the point that he is making:  there is a unity among the fantastically varied music that Morricone wrote).  After an introduction, rather embarrassing in its intimacy -- we see the old man doing energetic calisthenics on his floor -- Tornatore proceeds in a roughly chronological fashion, outlining the principal events in Morricone's life in the order in which these things happened.  As it turns out, almost nothing much is worth saying about Morricone's private life -- he was married for sixty or seventy years and seems to have lived, breathed, and died (at the end) composing music.  Morricone's father was an autocrat who forced his son to learn the trumpet -- father was a professional trumpeter himself -- when the teenager hoped to study medicine.  "Play trumpet," his father told him, "and you will always be able to feed your family."  Morricone became an expert player and, then, studied composition.  Until he was around 35, he worked largely in jazz bands, but had his own ensemble that performed extremely advanced musique concrete -- that is, blasts of sound with weird bangs and blips interpolated between the fortissimi.  He made a little money writing bits and pieces for radio and, then, in 1961, was asked to score some low-budget spaghetti Westerns.  Morricone seems to have regarded this work as humiliating, a downward departure from his dream to be a well-recognized avant-garde classical composer.  Showing his disinterest in movie music, Morricone scored his first couple Westerns for a man whistling, blows on an anvil, and the cracking of a whip -- in other words, parody musique concrete.  To his surprise, these practical joke compositions were wildly successful and, soon, he was working with Sergio Leone on his big-budget Westerns, including the trilogy of films starring Clint Eastwood.  On these pictures, Morricone developed his sound-effect oriented compositions to include drumming, more whistling, and howling coyotes.  Leone recognized that Morricone's scores were intrinsic to the success of his horse operas and encouraged Ennio to further experimentation, creating lavish soundscapes such as "the Ecstasy of Gold" music from The Good, Bad, and the Ugly.  The most spectacular of these scores was the Wagnerian music for Once Upon a Time in the West.  This movie commences with an array of sound-effects:  dripping water, a rusty windmill turning in the desert breeze, spurs jangling on plank floors, the lonesome hoot of a train, and, then, the harmonica-theme that sounds when Charles Bronson, as a deadly killer, arrives at the deserted station to gun-down the three assassins waiting for him.  The rest of the film is scored with memorable themes for each of the major characters.  The most gorgeous of these leit-motif elements is the music accompanying Claudia Cardinale's character.  I still remember with tears in my eyes the scene (watched in black and white on a little TV more than fifty years ago in the middle of the night) in which Claudia Cardinale waits for her husband (she's a mail-order bride) at the deserted train station, then, to a soaring musical theme, walks through the station as the camera climbs into the sky on a crane to reveal behind the building the entire vista of the old West: wagon trains, false-front saloons, Indians, prospectors, everything you can imagine extending to the horizon where we glimpse the red buttes of Monument Valley -- I don't know any sequence in film more lyrical and moving than the conjunction of Morricone's music and Leone's lavish imagery.  (It's odd that one of the greatest moments in any Western was made by two Italians with Italian cast and crew.)  The documentary proceeds to show us film clips with short technical explanations by Morricone (he sings the themes in a sort of atonal yipping voice) and, then, close-ups of critics and celebrities praising his brilliant work.  The picture is an unabashed example of hagiography featuring encomiums by Bruce Springsteen (he uses the theme from Once upon a Time in the West to begin and end his concerts), Quentin Tarantino, Bernardo Bertolucci, and a hundred others including rap artists and pop singers of all kinds.  The movie is worth seeing for the fantastic film clips showing how precisely and wonderfully Morricone creates mood and meaning with his music -- in many instances, the music animates otherwise stale subject matter and is, often, far better than the movies that it inhabits.  (Morricone scored everything from Hollywood art films like Days of Heaven to giallo such as Bird with the Crystal Plumage and soft-core porn.)  Highlights in the documentary include the Verdi-inflected score for Bertolucci's Communist epic 1900, the score for Leone's last movie, the gangster picture Once Upon a Time in America, and, of course, the tremendous and thunderous music for Roland Joffe's The Mission, reputedly a composition that dwarfs the film in which it appears.  The music is superb and it activates the images and makes them swoon and throb with emotion.  There are a few interesting anecdotes but not many because Morricone is his music and really nothing more:  We learn he composed "like a person writing a letter" -- that is, at lightning speed; he could play chess while conducting a large orchestra -- while recording the music ("the fire symphony") for Terence Malick's Days of Heaven, Malick shouted out chess moves to him and Morricone responded with his own moves, playing chess without a board in his head even as he directed the orchestra.  The film has a couple narrative arcs but they are insubstantial -- there's Morricone's desire to win an Oscar (he lost to the horror of most critics to Round Midnight in the year that he wrote the music for The Mission; Ennio says that the music in the jazz film was good and the piano playing competent but none of the tunes were composed for the movie; they were jazz standards.)  We know that Oscars are generally not awarded for merit and, so, Morricone's reputed yearning to win such an award seems a little childish.  (He was ultimately awarded two Oscars, one for lifetime achievement when he was in his early eighties and expected to fade away, and, then, for his score for Tarantino's The Hateful Eight far and away the best thing in that rather abhorrent movie.)  The film's other theme is the gradual understanding by Morricone's teachers and peers in the classical music world that the movie composer outstripped them all in invention and innovation in his film scores.  This also seems contrived and a false narrative -- Morricone always knew he was better than the stuffed-shirts in the classical music ghetto and, so, his happiness at the acclamation of these types rings a little hollow.

Tornatore, who worked with Ennio on Cinema Paradiso, is a sentimental and unskilled documentarian.  We could do with less commentary by swooning "talking heads" and more film clips scored by Morricone.  But the movie is a labor of love and Morricone's work is amazing and powerful and so carries the film despite its obvious defects.