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John Williams is obviously and without question one of the greatest film composers who’s ever lived, but that still feels like something of an understatement. The case could be made that 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 the cinema (to say nothing of his gifts to “Sunday Night Football,” NBC News, and the Olympic Games). Indeed, Williams’ greatness is so obvious and self-evident that Laurent Bouzereau’s lovingly basic documentary about him only needs to sit back, shut up, and let the music do the talking. After all, what else is there to say about a 92-year-old workaholic who claims that his inspiration comes to him from the sky? How do you interrogate what Steven Spielberg refers to as “the purest form of artistic expression I’ve ever experienced from a human being?”
A richer and more curious film might not frame those 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 it is a hyper-bloated version of the tribute reel the Oscars might play before giving Williams a lifetime achievement award (do they still air those things?), Bouzereau’s movie immediately concedes that Williams is just a simple fella from Flushing who happens to have scored our collective imagination. And I mean immediately: The very first thing we hear is Steven Spielberg saying that “Jonny is too nice of a guy to write such genius music.”
That’s about as deep and contentious as things will get over the course of a film that effectively just marches through Williams’ greatest hits in chronological order, following whatever tempo 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, it’s absolute nirvana for anyone who has a Proustian relationship to the theme from “Jurassic Park” or hears the sound of the movies themselves in the opening blast of “Star Wars.” While “Music by John Williams” is by no means a film worthy of John Williams’ music, I suppose that its EPK-level complexity befits a virtuoso who concludes that “Music is enough for a lifetime, but a lifetime isn’t 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 is really, really, really big — some of it so formative to cinephiles of a certain age that listening to Williams reflect on the process of writing it eventually feels like getting a first-hand account of Moses’ conversation with God on Mt. Sinai. Bouzereau is so eager to get to the good stuff that he speeds through the biographical details in double time, blitzing through his subject’s childhood — and his later stint in the U.S. Air Force Band — before slowing down to recount how Williams stumbled into the film world after initially setting his sights on the jazz scene. (Williams confesses that he’s never been much of a movie guy, though some of the best parts of this doc illustrate how profoundly inspired he was by watching rough cuts of films like “E.T.” and “Home Alone.”)
“Music by John Williams” only settles into a stable rhythm when Spielberg — a very willing participant in this doc — reaches out to the composer in the early 1970s. Williams will later refer to their first meeting as “the luckiest day of his life,” and, from the beginning, Bouzereau so privileges their collaboration that the harmonica motif from “The Sugarland Express” gets more screen time here than just about everything else Williams had done up to that point (a CV that already included working with Robert Altman and William Wyler, not to mention an Academy Award for “Fiddler on the Roof”).
From there, Bouzereau plows forward from one film to another, his film hardly even breaking its stride to acknowledge the sudden death of Williams’ first wife on the set of “California Split”; their daughter is on hand to convey the devastation, but the composer himself simply concedes that he poured himself into his work, and Bouzereau has no interest in examining that further. Most viewers won’t either, as it’s hard to do anything but smile and shake your head while listening to Williams and Spielberg compare notes about the “Jaws” theme or remember how they banged their heads against the wall over the ending of “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” “Star Wars” fans might already know every last detail about the making of “A New Hope,” but it’s still thrilling to hear George Lucas recall his initial dissatisfaction with the first draft of the “Binary Sunset” music cue, only for Bouzereau to follow it with the legendary cue that Williams went home and wrote that night.
To hear these scores in such close succession is to appreciate the orchestral majesty that Williams brought to a medium that had threatened to move beyond it; if this documentary has a consistent theme (and I’m not entirely sure that it does), it would have to be Williams’ steadfast resistance to a future that celebrates the now at the expense of the eternal. An avowed classicist, Williams is impressed by the sheer variety of film music as it 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 single greatest piece of music he ever wrote), and watching Kate Capshaw tear up as she remembers hearing it for the first time, it’s tempting to think that we already have.
The timeless sincerity of his work is so crucial to the enduring appeal of films like “Superman” and “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” to the point that it feels like he’s only been so good for so long because he writes music that’s meant to last forever. (Alas, Williams’ reverence for the great masters wasn’t enough to impress some members of the Boston Pops, who literally hissed at the idea of being conducted by someone they saw as a glorified popcorn salesman.) Williams was such a perfect match for Spielberg because 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 reflect upon how their retrograde sensibilities have come to inform so many of Hollywood’s most brilliant futures.
It’s cute that Chris Martin pops up to explain why Coldplay always takes the stage to the theme from “E.T.,” and that Seth MacFarlane is such a Williams fanboy that Peter Griffin sometimes hums his music on the couch, but everything that needs to be said about the maestro’s undying relevance is contained in the opening notes of Rey’s theme from “Star Wars: The Force Awakens,” which sound like they were excavated from some desert planet a long time ago in a galaxy far away, but also galvanized an entire new generation of blockbuster entertainment (for better or worse). “How does he do it?,” someone asks. “Music by John Williams” doesn’t have the slightest idea. This long and indulgent doc is content to let us bask in the mystery of it all, if only because it understands that people will be asking that same question for centuries to come.
Grade: B-
“Music by John Williams” is now available to stream on Disney Plus.
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