Ennio (2023)
Directed by Giuseppe Tornatore
In this almost three-hour long documentary, Giuseppe Tornatore tells the story of Ennio Morricone – the music composer who changed film music forever.
Morricone got famous with his creative and experimental scores to Sergio Leone’s Spaghetti Westerns, like the Dollars Trilogy (For a Fistfull of Dollars (1964), For a Few Dollars More (1965), the Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966)), which defined, how a Western should sound, for generations to come. The movie, however, goes much deeper, than the Westerns. It explores a decades long career: from the early sixties, where Morricone defined the sound of Italian pop-music, over his amazing collaboration with Dario D'Argento at the peak of the Giallo genre and his Oscar win for the original score for Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight in 2015.
A career marked by love for music and the iron will to not be compromised in his artistic vision, the movie portrays Ennio as a man of conviction, but not someone, who is not willing to change. Rather, we see a man, who was always at the ready to learn from his mistakes and to move on. Only by continuous learning and always reinventing himself, did he have such a profound impact on cinema music. Any score of the last 40 years is highly influenced by his compositions, be it John Williams’ classical compositions, Hans Zimmer’s bombastic hooks or Justin Hurwitz’ creative musical landscapes.
The movie itself is well-structured, but for a lack of dramatic narrative, as by all accounts, Morricone was a well-adjusted, hard-working artist, it one too many times circles back to the notion that he was unappreciated in some way. It takes a lot of time explaining, how he was shunned by his peers, because he was “whoring himself out” by writing film music, instead of serious music; and several times comes back to the fact that he didn’t get an Academy Award, until very late in life. This dramatic insistence of the world somehow wronging Morricone, somewhat cheapens the message for me, but not enough to be grating or to make the movie unenjoyable.
Overall, a solid documentary about a genius composer, who changed, how we watch movies forever.