'Ennio' Movie Review:

Here's the test for any music documentary. Five minutes in, are you already pulling up Spotify on your phone? With Ennio, you might do it before the title card.

Giuseppe Tornatore's documentary about the Italian composer who soundtracked your life (whether you knew it or not) opens with the man himself doing morning calisthenics in his Rome apartment. That's the framing. Not a deification. Not a montage of magazine covers. Just a 90-year-old in a tracksuit, who happens to have written The Good, The Bad and the Ugly.

This is Tornatore's thirteenth collaboration with Morricone, and you can feel it. The two of them go back to Cinema Paradiso in 1988, the film that won Tornatore his Best Foreign Language Film Oscar and gave Morricone one of his most loved scores. Ennio is essentially Tornatore returning a favour that ran for decades. He sits with his old friend across one long, structured interview, lets him talk, and builds the whole film around that conversation.

The result premiered at the 78th Venice Film Festival in September 2021, where Tornatore reportedly got a standing ovation before the film even started. Audiences knew what was coming. Ennio went on to win the David di Donatello and the Nastro d'Argento for Best Documentary in 2022. It currently sits at 8.2 on IMDb and 90% on Rotten Tomatoes. Numbers don't usually mean much, but for a nearly three-hour film about an Italian film composer, those are wild.

The reason to watch is simple. There is no other film like this one, and there cannot be another. Morricone died in July 2020, aged 91. Tornatore had already shot the interviews. So this documentary is, by accident, the last full record of the maestro telling his own story. He talks about being a reluctant film composer (he wanted to write "absolute" music, the kind that lives in concert halls, not over a studio mix). He talks about Sergio Leone, the third-grade classmate from Rome's Trastevere neighbourhood who would, decades later, pull him into the western and change everything. He talks about feeling embarrassed, for years, by his own pop arrangements in the early 60s. He plays chess. He hums his own themes. He gets things wrong and corrects himself.

Around him, Tornatore stacks a roster of interviewees that reads like the back room of a film festival. Bernardo Bertolucci, Marco Bellocchio, Dario Argento, the Taviani brothers, Liliana Cavani, Roland Joffé, Oliver Stone, Barry Levinson, Brian De Palma, Quentin Tarantino, Clint Eastwood, Bruce Springsteen, Hans Zimmer, Pat Metheny, James Hetfield, Joan Baez, Wong Kar-wai. Some are talking about specific films they made with Morricone. Others are just trying to articulate what his music did to them. Springsteen's bit about being a kid in a movie theatre watching The Good, The Bad and the Ugly is the kind of thing you don't forget. Eastwood, true to form, gives Morricone the highest deadpan compliment he has in him.

The most moving thread isn't the famous fans, though. It's Morricone working through his own catalogue, scene by scene, talking about choices that have become so canonical we forget they were once just choices. The coyote howl that turned into the Good, The Bad and the Ugly theme. The way the trumpet in Once Upon a Time in the West isn't really doing what trumpets do. The decision to put a soprano voice (Edda Dell'Orso, who appears in the film herself) over those vast, sweeping melodies. By the time he's talking about The Mission and the oboe theme he initially didn't even want to write, you'll be quietly devastated.

What doesn't fully land. The film is long. Tornatore is reverent in a way some viewers will find airless. There are stretches that play like a victory lap, with director after director showing up to confirm that yes, Morricone was a genius. If you're not already invested, the parade of testimonials starts to flatten into one note. Even sympathetic critics have called it conventional, and they aren't wrong. The form is in service of the subject, and the subject earns it, but if you came in cold, that runtime is going to ask things of you.

Things to look out for. Morricone's relationship with his teacher Goffredo Petrassi at the Conservatorio di Santa Cecilia, the conservatory composer who never quite approved of his prized student going into film. There's real tension there, and Morricone never fully resolves it. His chess obsession also keeps surfacing. The film hints, without overstating, that the same brain that loved chess problems was solving musical ones. Worth knowing as you watch: he reportedly drew once against world champion Boris Spassky and faced off against Garry Kasparov and Anatoly Karpov too. Watch for the home footage with his wife Maria Travia, the woman who quietly wrote the Latin text for the choir in The Mission. She's the ground the film stands on.

Trivia worth knowing before you press play. Morricone composed over 400 film scores in his career and sold more than 70 million records. He received six Oscar nominations, lost five times, and finally won Best Original Score in 2016 for Quentin Tarantino's The Hateful Eight, becoming, at 87, the oldest person at the time to win a competitive Oscar. Nine years before that, in 2007, the Academy gave him an Honorary Oscar. The man who handed it to him onstage was Clint Eastwood. The documentary, deliberately and a little heartbreakingly, never tells you Morricone is gone. He's alive in every frame.

Who it's for. Anyone who's ever felt their chest tighten at the opening of Cinema Paradiso. Anyone who watched The Hateful Eight purely for the score. Anyone who didn't know they could love a film about a composer until they sat down for one.

What you'll leave with. A streaming queue full of films you forgot Morricone scored. A Spotify history that's about to get very Italian. And a strange, specific grief for a man you only met for two and a half hours.