‘Music by John Williams’ Review: Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and More Celebrate the Iconic Composer in a Winning Disney+ Doc

One of the most reliable pieces of Disney+‘s still-evolving brand has been adulatory celebrity-driven commercials masquerading as “documentaries” while offering cheery and worshipful portraits of figures like Jim Henson, Mickey Mouse and the collective Imagineering profession.

Laurent Bouzereau’s 105-minute Music by John Williams, premiering at AFI Fest ahead of its Nov. 1 Disney+ debut, is the most creatively successful of this genre. Especially in the first hour, it’s a richly satisfying tribute to an unimpeachable cinematic legend who, one could easily argue, has become even more beloved than the iconic directors he collaborated with or the movie stars whose legends his themes and cues helped burnish.

There’s little doubt that evoking the name “John Williams” produces a Pavlovian response more instantly visceral than the response to “Steven Spielberg” or “Tom Hanks.” And more varied as well! Bouzereau is able to take advantage of that psychological burrowing, knowing that any room of a dozen viewers could make a dozen different instant associations with any mention of Williams’ name — from thoughts of Superman or E.T. taking flight to the subaquatic rumble of a shark’s approach to the orchestral Yahrzeit candle of Itzhak Perlman’s plaintive violin solos to the wonder induced by a first encounter with a resurrected dinosaur or an alien spacecraft.

Without always digging quite as deeply as nerdier film fans might like, Music by John Williams honors the breadth of Williams’ impact and legacy, pushing every emotional button for an experience that will produce tears, edification and a compulsive desire to immediately seek out 25 different Williams-scored features. Many of which, not coincidentally, happen to be available on Disney+.

Bouzereau, whose introspective Hollywood on Hollywood documentaries have included substantive films like the Emmy-winning Five Came Back and glorified promos like Disney+’s Timeless Heroes: Indiana Jones & Harrison Ford, is able to leverage his exhaustive resumé for impeccable access here. Would Steven Spielberg be this utterly comfortable hanging out with a director who hadn’t made an uncountable number of behind-the-scenes features with him over the years? Impossible to know for sure, but the best parts here show Williams and Spielberg literally just standing around chatting about their collaborations.

Those sequences, as well as footage from an apparently exhaustive filmed retrospective panel with Spielberg and Williams, make a persuasive argument that this could have been an even simpler movie than Bouzereau’s already straightforward approach has made of it. Put Spielberg and Williams or Lucas and Williams in a room together, give them a snippet of music to discuss, take two steps back and let the magic flow. To Bouzereau’s credit, that’s a lot of what he does.

In addition to Spielberg and Lucas, Bouzereau has assembled an intimidating roster of Williams’ filmmaking collaborators, including J.J. Abrams, Chris Columbus, Ron Howard, Kathleen Kennedy and Frank Marshall, whose relationship with the maestro goes back to his own childhood. The lineup of fellow composers and musicians is at least equally impressive, from colleagues like Alan Silvestri and Thomas Newman to some of the most recognizable classical performers — Perlman, Yo-Yo Ma, Emanuel Ax, Anna-Sophie Mutter — and even Chris Martin of Coldplay and Branford Marsalis, whose giddy appreciation for the jazz bona fides of the Star Wars cantina band is contagious.

Music by John Williams‘ first hour, its most effective, is chronological. Making savvy use of Williams’ nostalgia-saturated score from The Fabelmans, Spielberg’s most autobiographical feature, Bouzereau traces a course through Williams’ music-driven childhood to his Hollywood introduction as a jazz pianist, session musician, orchestrator and then composer. None of it is exactly revelatory, but it’s always helpful to note that Williams has had a journey that started with Gilligan’s Island and somehow stretched all the way to Schindler’s List.

The memory-driven reflections on Williams’ first collaborations with Spielberg, which brought him to work with Lucas, and the magical year in which Williams composed scores for Star Wars, Close Encounters and Black Sunday are methodical. But owing to the warmth of the storytelling and, of course, countless musical snippets, they never feel dry.

Sometimes, the documentary even feels rigorous. Thanks to his ample access to Spielberg’s home movies, Bouzereau is able to give us behind-the-scenes treats like footage from various scoring sessions, as well as a few precious outtakes like music-free clips from Jaws and unused pieces from Star Wars. But I wish there were more moments like the one where Williams blends musical theory and rhetoric to explain why the five-note central theme of Close Encounters is more effective than the pages of additional five-note combinations he experimented with.

There could stand to be more actual discussion of process from Williams, and more effort from the assembled musicians to nerd out about what makes Williams special. Instead, we get David Newman giving a rudimentary definition of “leitmotif” and seeming almost embarrassed at how fancy he’s getting. But there’s only so much that can be covered in a feature-length documentary.

It’s almost inevitable that some pieces of Williams’ body of work will either be completely ignored — count The Fury and 1941 among my favorite Williams scores that don’t warrant a mention — or given short shrift. I spent the recent Paris Olympiad thinking, not for the first time, about how Williams’ Olympics fanfare is one of his most essential compositions. Here, however, it’s presented as first among equals in a “Here are a bunch of other things Williams wrote for” segment.

A lot of effort is put into making a long-since-settled argument about Williams’ essential position as a cross-discipline titan of orchestral music in America, when it’s been maybe 30 years since even the biggest snob would have contended that John Williams was anything other than a boon to this country’s classical music landscape. Williams’ own classical work is fully acknowledged, though I would have loved more commentary from artists like Perlman and Ma on the different versions of him that they’ve worked with over the years, or from Marsalis on the evidence of Williams’ earliest jazz work on subsequent scores like Catch Me If You Can. If the first hour is more point-by-point analysis, the last 45 minutes are more nebulous celebration, and I’ll state a preference for the former.

With the film’s concentration on Williams the artist — at 92, he’s still composing and conducting at a pace that defies reason — Williams the man is a bit of an afterthought. There are a few sad anecdotes about the death of his first wife and some funny notes on the importance golf to his current relationship with his daughter, but Bouzereau and Williams figure that’s not what you’re watching for.

You’ll come away from Music by John Williams feeling that Williams had been properly celebrated — and that, if there’s any more celebration required, it can be done by streaming Jaws, Lincoln, Saving Private Ryan and Sugarland Express in one glorious and melodic evening.