Music by John Williams Film Review (2024)

It probably would have been a joy to watch Music by John Williams even if you weren't as immersed in the process of setting it as you are now: a glorified addition that hits our nostalgic triggers mostly for the way it hits our nostalgic triggers , fun. What's special about it is that it really cares about the basics of connecting images and music and knows how to explain the intricacies to people who aren't musicians.

“Music by John Williams” is a Disney+ documentary directed by Laurent Bouzereau, who for many years has been the virtual official chronicler of the careers of Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and other great American filmmakers around him. In the interviews with Williams, now 92, a certain level of comfort is evident as he sits at the same piano on which he has composed scores since the 1960s and walks us through the theory and practice of his work, that of television scores in the 1960s (“Lost in Space”, incidental music for “Gilligan's Island”, playing the piano on the theme of “Peter Gunn”) through the blockbusters of the 1970s (“Star Wars”, “Jaws”, “Superman” etc.). ) and further into the 21st century (the “Harry Potter” main theme, the “Star Wars” prequels and sequels and other Spielberg films). Williams' last film score before his retirement was Spielberg's cinematic memoir The Fablemans, which brought the story of their partnership full circle.

“Music by John Williams” is in some ways an official product and advertisement for Disney, which acquired Lucasfilm (which produced Indiana Jones and Star Wars) and which, through its purchase of 20th Century Fox, now also owns Williams-voiced films published by Fox, including the series “Home Alone” and films by Robert Altman, Oliver Stone and others. But it doesn't play like a surreptitious commercial for a music catalog owned entirely by a media conglomerate or hedge fund, which is all too often the case with recent documentaries about musicians. And it's never content to let the various interviewees – including Branford Marsalis, Elvis Mitchell, JJ Abrams and many other film composers, including Thomas Newman and Alan Silvestri – simply shower Williams with compliments. Once the film gets past its throat-clearing, overly hyped prelude (unfortunately seemingly obligatory in the age of streaming), it settles into a relaxed and satisfying mode, somewhere between a critical biography of a great American artist and a teaching tool for anyone who want to learn more about how films are made. There's a sense of breathlessness again at the end, but given the scope of Williams' achievements, it feels earned.

Bouzereau always focuses on the practical aspects of filmmaking and film music. He brings in biographical elements when they are important to the timeline of Williams' development: there are many details about Williams' relationship with his father, mother, siblings and children, all musicians, and about the transformative impact that loss had His first wife, actress and singer Barbara Ruick, suffered an aneurysm when she was just 43 years old. But a lot of it has to do with Williams sitting at the piano and guiding us through the ideas behind some of the most artistically, commercially and technically significant blockbusters. Over the past 60 years, he has varied the rhythm, the emphasis and sometimes the arrangement of famous leitmotifs to show how different a famous section of a film could have seemed if it had changed even one or two elements.

Williams is often accompanied on screen by Spielberg, his best collaborator and excellent teacher/guide, who is almost as eloquent as Williams when it comes to explaining how the filmed image merges with the music to create something greater than could achieve both alone. Williams' scores are sometimes cleverly excerpted as accompaniment to biographical sections related to the themes of the films for which he composed them (“The Fablemans” is used in the section about Williams' own childhood and adolescence).

Just as “The Fablemans” reframes many of Spielberg's films and makes you want to watch them again, “Music by John Williams” will make you want to hear his music again, whether as part of a film or individually, and think back to what you learned here about his life and artistic development.

Williams' score for Spielberg's “Catch Me If You Can,” for example, is not only a throwback to the brassy, ​​jazz-orchestral work of Elmer Bernstein from the '50s and '60s in films like “A Walk on the Wild Side” and “The Sweet Smell of Success” (Bernstein was one of the many great score composers who employed the young Williams, credited here with the piano part in Bernstein’s score “To Kill a Mockingbird”). It's also a callback to Williams' own other pop-jazz scores for '60s TV shows, which he did under the name Johnny Williams; a connection to his jazzy work for Robert Altman on serial television and the films “The Long Goodbye” and “California Split”; and a tribute to his father's work as a jazz drummer and being surrounded by jazz musicians growing up. “My parents’ friends were all musicians,” Williams says, “and I thought that’s what you did when you grew up.”

The jazz factor also comes up in the section about the original 1977 Star Wars. Marsalis – who calls Williams' piano performance on the “Peter Gunn” theme “the foundation of jazz-funk” – notes: “It's hard to imagine someone writing a piece like the Cantina Scene without having absolutely no idea about it to have jazz. I've heard a lot of bad stuff like that and it seems like a cliched affectation at best.”

And of course the documentary is a farewell to Williams, the latest in a line of film musicians who were once the norm in Hollywood. Williams emerged in the final decade of the old studio system in the early 1960s, having honed his skills in Air Force bands. His first work as a film musician was a documentary about the Canadian coastal provinces. He played in studio orchestras at Columbia and 20th Century Fox under the direction of legends such as Bernard Herrmann, Henry Mancini and Franz Waxman. He still composes the old-fashioned way, without the aid of a computer, by selecting melodies and themes on his piano and writing diagrams with a pencil. His grandson Ethan Gruska says, “He's someone who learned his skills the hard way, and now he lives in a time where you can use AI to conjure music from a command prompt.”

I've collected film scores on vinyl most of my life and have been a fan and student of Williams all along, but I still learned a lot about his work and the art from watching this film. It's full of illuminations, such as Silvestri's commentary on Williams' minimalist piano theme for Jaws (“One thing a theme is great at is it can keep a character on the screen, even when they're on the screen is not visible”) and Williams' analysis of the five-note theme for the aliens in “Close Encounters” (“like a subjunctive clause or a phrase ending with And, If or But“).

The friendship and partnership between Williams and Spielberg is the backbone of the film and the source of its warmth and much of its humor, as when Williams talks about being so moved by a music-free early version of Schindler's List that He told Spielberg that he should find a better composer, and Spielberg replied, “I know, but they're all dead.” “Any of his scores would be a lifetime achievement for any other composer,” says Abrams. It's true. At 100 minutes, Music by John Williams is too short to spend very long on a single score (it could easily have been a 10-part series), and this inevitably leaves a lot of work skipped. But that's the nature of things: you can't say everything, neither in words nor in music, and decisions have to be made. Nevertheless, this is an essential work not only about Williams, but also about many of his fellow composers, role models and film partners, as well as about filmmaking in general. It is watched for pleasure and taught in schools. Like a John Williams score, it stays with you even after the credits roll.