ENNIO (2021)

Somewhere near the end of Ennio (2021), the warm and fascinating tribute to the extraordinary Ennio Morricone directed by Giuseppe Tornatore (Cinema Paradiso), film composer Nicola Piovani (The Son's Room) rightly deflates Quentin Tarantino's bloviating about Morricone being his favorite composer as hyperbole typical of the director. ("And not just film composer, but composer-- I'm talking Beethoven, Bach, Schubert..." QT would likely have gone on, but you get the sense that those three names probably exhausted his knowledge of classical music.) Yet with Piovani's observation in pocket, Ennio still succeeds in making the case that Morricone, over the six decades of work and 500-plus films for which he wrote the scores, might just be the most innovative, exciting, influential and, yeah, maybe the greatest composer of film music that ever was or will be.

Without ever skimping on the evidence of Morricone's irascibility or inability to suffer fools and their paper-thin ideas, there's much more evidence on hand in Ennio of the man's welcoming presence as teller of his own story and of his particular genius, and not just from the breathless testimony of a grand gallery of talking heads. To see Morricone himself tracing the notes and the themes, extrapolating on ideas and forms and thoughts, all set against the music itself as the ultimate aural illustration, is to come within a faint whistle's distance, or that of a wind-borne refrain of a reverberating harmonica, of insight into the quality of that genius, a proximity hagiographies like this one often fail to approach.

Ennio made me ache to see (and hear) Once Upon a Time in America (1984) again (having missed the long cut during a recent Morricone tribute at the Academy Museum in Los Angeles), to hear his haunting score for Casualties of War (1990), and to regret even more than I have before the two times I had tickets to see Morricone conduct his film music at the Hollywood Bowl-- both engagements were cancelled due to the maestro's ill health. But I also loved the stories of his tussles with filmmakers like Pier Paolo Pasolini and Elio Petri, the tales (and pictures) of his history (going back to grade school) with Sergio Leone, and especially Morricone's emotional recollections of his ow mentors, some of whom never understood their pupil's crescendo of devotion to this less-than-"absolute" music.

Tornatore's documentary made me gasp several times during all these sorts of moments, but never as much as I did during the segment focusing on Once Upon a Time in the West (1969). I find it impossible to watch Jill McBain's arrival on the train at around the half-hour mark of that movie, so empathetically, organically scored to Morricone's sublimely, aching romantic "Jill's Theme," without bursting into tears. And so it happened again watching the sequence here, the familiar images of the film enhanced, embodied by that music, and this time intercut with footage of the superb soprano Edda Dell'Orso, who supplied the gorgeous, soaring vocals to accompany Claudia Cardinale's arrival, actually recording the music I've been so moved by ever since I first saw the film.

For a transcendent moment like this, and seemingly thousands of othrs, I, and we, must always be grateful for what Morricone has brought to our collective dream of moviegoing. Ennio expresses that gratitude by honoring those contributions, and then some. If you've ever been transported by one of his scores, you owe it to yourself to see this excellent documentary.

***********************************