Ennio review: Warm portrait of cinema’s greatest maestro

Sometime in the early 1970s, the politicised Italian director Elio Petri invited Ennio Morricone to look at a rough cut of Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion, which would go on to win Best Foreign Language Film at the Oscars. To Morricone’s horror, Petri had used a different Morricone composition than the one he had written for the film. The encounter ended, as a tearful Morricone recalls, with Petri begging forgiveness: “You created the best music I could ever have imagined; you should slap me in the face.”

Ennio, this warm if unwieldy portrait of the composer by his friend and collaborator Giuseppe Tornatore – director of Cinema Paradiso, a film powered along by one of Morricone’s best-known scores – is at its best when the maestro hums a refrain that is, by now, a well known film score, recounts a dispute with the director, and then recalls how the filmmaker came around. That process is repeated with Brian De Palma, Sergio Leone, and countless others. It is not repeated with Oliver Stone, who collaborated with Morricone on U-Turn and seems to have rubbed him up the wrong way entirely. A potential collaboration with Stanley Kubrick on A Clockwork Orange, sadly, comes to nothing.

Pay homage

Many talking heads – from Mike Patton to Metallica’s James Hetfield to famed recluse Terrence Malick – turn up to pay homage to the composer of more than 400 screen scores across projects as varied as all The Battle of Algiers, Days of Heaven, and The Thing.

In common with Edgar Wright’s recent portrait of Sparks, Tornatore’s film largely eschews such niceties as documentary structure in favour of enthusiastic chronology. And then Ennio worked with Pasolini; and then he worked with Dario Argento. And so on.

It’s an interesting biography, nonetheless. Morricone’s musical career began during the second World War, when he found himself playing the trumpet and writing dance tunes to support his family. His classical education in composition at Rome’s Santa Cecilia Conservatory would see him mentored by composer Goffredo Petrassi and would create a lifelong sense of guilt for working in the commercial world of film.

“I told my wife in the 1960s that I would quit film in 1970; I told her in the 1970s that I would quit film in 1980; I told her in the 1980s that I would quit film in 1990; now I say nothing,” recalls Morricone.

There is little sense of Morricone’s home life, or Maria, his wife of 40 years, constant sounding board and occasional lyricist. He, however, makes for a warmly emotional presence on camera who never flags, even when the tributes around him get a little repetitive.

Unmistakable

His account of the improvisation he used for Dario Argento’s giallos is wild, his various John Cage inspired techniques are even wilder. Throughout, however, as various contributors note, there’s a Morricone sound that remains unmistakable: “How is it possible that you can recognise a piece of music by Ennio Morricone on the first note,” wonders Hans Zimmer. “When you listen to [his music] you can’t forget it,” adds Wong Kar-Wai.

Morricone was in his 80s when he finally won an Oscar for his work on The Hateful Eight, having been scandalously overlooked for his work on The Mission three decades before. He died aged 91, in 2020 as a result of injuries sustained during a fall. Even considering the thousands of compositions he left behind, it’s an incalculable loss to cinema.