Review: 'Ennio' captures the music and passion of composer Ennio Morricone, through his words, his admirers and his movies

There are few people who have worked in movies who deserved the title “maestro” more fully than the composer Ennio Morricone, who is credited with hundreds of film and TV scores over six decades, right up to his death in 2020 at age 91.

Giuseppe Tornatore — who worked with Morricone on 13 films, starting with “Cinema Paradiso” in 1988 — turns out to be the right person to capture the composer’s exhaustive history and restless musical spirit, as he does in the documentary “Ennio.”

Morricone’s training was as varied as his film scores. His first music teacher was his father, a trumpet player who instilled the lesson that music could put bread on his family’s table. After playing in a military band, Morricone made his way to the academy, where he was considered a lower-class hayseed by the snooty elites. He mentored under the modern classical composer Goffredo Petrassi, though the teacher and the other students looked down their nose at Morricone’s work on film scores, which they considered not “real” music (though Petrassi wrote a few film scores himself). Morricone also was inspired by the avant-garde work of people like John Cage, who famously knocked over radios and did other offbeat things to make music.

With those disparate influences, it’s no surprise that Morricone’s early scores had an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink quality to them. He liked to experiment, sometimes throwing in oddball instrumentation or playing two themes in counterpoint. (I have to admit that I’ve never seen most of the ‘60s Italian movies Tornatore samples here, which makes the movies a great checklist of movies to seek out later.)

His breakthrough was his collaboration with director Sergio Leone on a series of low-budget American-style Westerns, filmed in Italy with a just a few American actors — including one, Clint Eastwood, who became a star because of them. Eastwood is one of dozens of people interviewed here, a mix of filmmakers and musicians who worked with Morricone, as well as a few familiar faces who admired or were inspired by his music. (For example, Bruce Springsteen talks about how he uses one of Morricone’s themes when he and the E Street band take the stage at every concert.)

Tornatore takes us through Morricone’s disappointments, too — like his six Oscar nominations, for which he finally won for his last one, Quentin Tarantino’s “The Hateful Eight” in 2015. Morricone, in an expansive interview, gets a little salty about losing in 1987 for Roland Joffe’s “The Mission,” to Herbie Hancock’s jazz score for “‘Round Midnight,” not because of Hancock’s work, but because many of Dexter Gordon’s solos were of existing jazz numbers. (In an amusing irony, Morricone’s 1987 score for Brian de Palma’s “The Untouchables” lost out to “The Last Emperor,” directed by another Italian director with whom Morricone had worked, Bernardo Bertolucci.)

The most fascinating parts of Tornatore’s interviews with Morricone and the other composers is when they talk about the work of making music. Morricone is self-effacing and analytical about his process and his product, and could hum themes and melodies (though he hated melodies as a concept) that he wrote decades earlier. And the other composers, even the ones who belittled him when they were growing up together, marvel about the depth and breadth of his career, and the endless inventiveness of his scores.

“Ennio” captures Morricone’s wit, his humility, his striving for perfection. Most importantly, though, it captures his music, in the context of some spectacular movies, and allows us to consider a lifetime of music in one engrossing sitting.

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‘Ennio’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, March 29, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Not rated, but probably R for some scenes of sexuality and nudity, violence and language. Running time: 157 minutes; in English and Italian, with subtitles.