Disney pays tribute to a great composer

John Williams is clearly and without a doubt one of the greatest film composers who ever lived, but that still feels like an understatement. The case could be made this way no one in his field – from Jerry Goldsmith and Bernard Herrmann to Ennio Morricone and Toru Takemitsu – has come remotely close to matching the sheer breadth, diversity and cultural impact of Williams’ contributions to film (not to mention of his gifts to “Sunday Night Football,” NBC News and the Olympic Games). Williams’ greatness is indeed that So It is obvious and self-evident that Laurent Bouzereau’s loving foundational documentary about him just needs to sit back, shut up and let the music speak for itself. After all, what else can be said about a 92-year-old workaholic who claims his inspiration comes from the sky? How do you interrogate what Steven Spielberg calls “the purest form of artistic expression I have ever experienced from a human being?”

A richer and more curious film might not take these as rhetorical questions, but “Music by John Williams” is – understandably – too awed by its subject to ask anything more about him. Less a celebrity bio-doc than a hyper-inflated version of the tribute the Oscars might play before Williams gets a Lifetime Achievement Award (do they still air those things?), Bouzereau’s film immediately admits that Williams is just a simple guy. from Vlissingen who happened to capture our collective imagination. And I mean immediately: The very first thing we hear is Steven Spielberg saying, “Jonny is too nice a man to write such brilliant music.”

That’s about as deep and controversial as things are going to get over the course of a film that basically just marches through Williams’ greatest hits in chronological order, at whatever pace the composer sets as he – along with a small assortment of talking heads – reflects on the creation and consequence of his most immortal scores. Needless to say, this is absolute nirvana for anyone who has a Proustian relationship with the theme from ‘Jurassic Park’ or hears the sound of the films themselves in the opening explosion of ‘Star Wars’. While ‘Music by John Williams’ is by no means a film worthy of John Williams’ music, I suppose its EPK-level complexity befits a virtuoso who concludes that ‘music is enough for a lifetime, but a lifetime not enough for music.” Williams insists that the music is bigger and more interesting than he is, and Bouzereau is happy to take the maestro at his word.

It helps that the music really, really, Real big – some of them are so formative for cinephiles of a certain age that listening to Williams reflect on the writing process ultimately feels like getting a firsthand account of Moses’ conversation with God on Mount Sinai. Bouzereau is so eager to get into the good stuff that he rushes through the biographical details in double time, flashing through his subject’s childhood – and his later stint in the US Air Force Band – before slowing down to tell how Williams entered the film business. after initially setting his sights on the jazz scene. (Williams admits he’s never really been a movie guy, though some of the best parts of this doc illustrate how deeply inspired he was by watching rough cuts of films like “ET” and “Home Alone.”)

‘Music by John Williams’ only settles into a steady rhythm when Spielberg – a very willing participant in this document – ​​contacts the composer in the early 1970s. Williams would later call their first meeting “the happiest day of his life,” and from the outset Bouzereau gives such priority to their collaboration that the harmonica motif from “The Sugarland Express” gets more screen time here than just about anything else Williams did up to that point had done (a resume that already included collaborations with Robert Altman and William Wyler, not to mention an Academy Award for “Fiddler on the Roof”).

From there, Bouzereau plows from one film to the next, his film barely breaking stride to acknowledge the sudden death of Williams’ first wife on the set of ‘California Split’; their daughter is ready to convey the devastation, but the composer himself simply admits that he has immersed himself in his work, and Bouzereau has no interest in exploring that further. Most viewers won’t either, because it’s hard to do anything other than smile and shake your head while listening to Williams and Spielberg compare notes on the “Jaws” theme or remember how they hit their heads against the wall hit during the end of ‘Close Encounters’. of the third kind.” “Star Wars” fans may already know every detail about the making of “A New Hope,” but it’s still exciting to hear George Lucas recall his initial dissatisfaction with the first version of the “Binary Sunset” music cue, only for Bouzereau to follow it up with the legendary cue that Williams went home and wrote that night.

Hearing these scores in such close succession makes you appreciate the orchestral majesty that Williams brought to a medium that was in danger of going beyond; If this documentary has a consistent theme (and I’m not entirely sure it does), it should be Williams’ steadfast resistance to a future that celebrates the now at the expense of the eternal. An outspoken classicist, Williams is impressed by the sheer variety of film music that exists today, but it pains him to think that we may never produce another Brahms. Listening to Williams’ theme from “Schindler’s List” (for my money, the greatest piece of music he ever wrote) and seeing Kate Capshaw burst into tears as she remembers hearing it for the first time, it’s tempting to think that we’ve already done that.

The timeless sincerity of his work is so crucial to the enduring appeal of films like “Superman” and “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” that it feels like he’s only been this good for so long because he writes music that’s meant to last forever . (Unfortunately, Williams’ reverence for the great masters was not enough to impress some members of the Boston Pops, who literally hissed at the idea of ​​being led by someone they saw as a glorified popcorn salesman.) Williams was like that n a perfect match for Spielberg as the young filmmaker was determined to bring real scores back to the movies at a time when soundtracks were all the rage, and it’s remarkable to think about how their retrograde sensibilities inspired so many of the most brilliant have informed the future of Hollywood.

It’s cute that Chris Martin shows up to explain why Coldplay always takes the stage with the theme from ‘ET’, and that Seth MacFarlane is such a Williams fanboy that Peter Griffin sometimes hums his music on the couch, but all that what needs to be said about the maestro’s immortal relevance is contained in the opening notes of Rey’s theme from ‘Star Wars: The Force Awakens’, which sound as if they were unearthed long ago on a desert planet in a galaxy far away, but also a whole have newly galvanized. generation of blockbuster entertainment (for better or worse). “How does he do that?” someone asks. “Music by John Williams” has no idea. This long and self-indulgent document is happy to let us bask in the mystery of it all, if only because it understands that people will be asking the same question for centuries to come.

Grade: B-

“Music by John Williams” is now available to stream on Disney Plus.

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