Most admirers add little in the documentary Ennio to what maestro Morricone himself has to say ★★★☆☆

He is the greatest film composer ever, or nay, the greatest composer of all time. His music makes atheists believe in an afterlife. He himself was a god. If, like some speakers, you Ennio If you think about Ennio Morricone (1928-2020) in such terms, you can safely indulge in this documentary.

For others, a warning about Giuseppe Tornatore’s more than two-and-a-half-hour canonization is in order: look Ennio especially to see the man himself speak, not the grueling relay race of famous and slightly less famous fans who cough up one superlative after another.

Tornatore, which from Nuovo cinema Paradise (1988) worked nine more times with Morricone, it took five years to collect the material Ennio† He doesn’t seem to have limited himself in the end result, with a veritable army of Morricone worshipers ranging from Liliana Cavani to Dario Argento, from Quentin Tarantino to Wong Kar-Wai, from Hans Zimmer to Joan Baez. Sure: a visionary genius like Morricone deserves epic treatment, but most speakers add little to what the maestro herself has to say.

Tornatore shows Morricone in his crammed office, while he is working furiously on a composition by heart, or air conducting one of his own recordings. The core of Ennio is the candid interview in which Morricone talks about his life and career. It is about his partnership with people like Sergio Leone, about his tireless inventiveness, his split as a composer of soundtracks and absolute music and about his desire for recognition in both areas.

Classics like Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) and The Mission (1986) are extensively discussed, but the film is all the more fascinating when more experimental scores are passed, or the adventurous song arrangements with which the young Morricone made a name for himself. The elderly Morricone talks about it as if it were yesterday. He regularly sings out his musical ideas during the interview, and he still cries when he remembers the support he received as a young composer from mentor Goffredo Petrassi. It is moving and valuable to meet the genius in such a humane and open mood.

‘I think that a score itself has to be meaningful for a film to come into its own,’ says Morricone. Only this conversation, interspersed with long film fragments in which you see and hear what he means: that would have been a nice tribute.