Whether you are Gen X, millennial, or Gen Z, John Williams probably wrote the soundtrack to your childhood. If you were to list out the 10 most famous music cues in film history, Williams almost certainly wrote half or more of them. With 54 nominations and five awards, he is the second-most-nominated person in the history of the Academy, behind none other than Walt Disney himself. At 92 years old and still working, his cultural legacy is staggering, almost beyond comprehension. As such, it’s a little more than one can fit into a 106-minute movie.
Director Laurent Bouzereau’s film follows most of the conventions we have come to expect from documentaries of this type. We get a little bit of background information on Williams’ parents – his father was a jazz drummer who worked with the greats; his mother was an actress and dancer; they met on the set of a movie they were both working on. We get Williams’ introduction to performing music, a little of his time in the service, and how he got started in movies. Then, we work chronologically through the biggest movies in his career.
If you watch enough of these types of movies, you’re familiar with the beats. What helps separate out Music by John Williams comes down to two related factors: 1) the “biggest movies in his career” also happen to be many of the biggest and most important movies in the history of the art form; and 2) because of that, the talking-head interviews are a who’s who of film history over the past 50 years. Of course, the best insights come from Williams himself and his greatest collaborator, Steven Spielberg.
Spielberg changed the face of the film industry forever, multiple times, but there is an argument to be made that he does not accomplish this without Williams’ contribution. I had this debate with a colleague earlier today, and I actually came down on the side of Spielberg likely succeeding nearly as well with someone like Alan Silvestri (Back to the Future, Forrest Gump) at his side. But, there is not a bone in my body that believes had that been the case that we would have five scores as iconoclastic as Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Raiders of the Lost Ark, ET, and Jurassic Park.
These films are full of images we can hear, and that is thanks to Williams. An unknown POV underwater: BUH-BUM. An adventurer running from a boulder: BUM-BUH-BUM-BUHHH. A boy and his best friend flying in front of the moon. We know what that sounds like because of Williams.
Any one of those five films would be the crowning achievement of any other composer’s career, and yet, it is possible none of them serves in that position for Williams because, of course, there is Star Wars. One of the documentary’s truly special moments comes in hearing people describe their reaction to the opening fanfare at the beginning of A New Hope. It is as though Williams discovered fire and suddenly there is light and warmth in the world.
The other major highlight of the film is listening to Kate Capshaw describe Williams playing the Schindler’s List score on the piano for her and Spielberg for the first time. The story brings a tear to her eye – and to ours.
Moments like this will be catnip for fans of film history and fans of these movies, but they also hint at the doc’s great flaw. Every interview, every conversation, every sequence is so geared toward the legacy of Williams’ accomplishments that Bouzereau treats the compositions themselves almost as fait accompli. It sure is a lot of fun to listen to famous filmmakers talk about music we all love, but it would have been more valuable to interrogate Williams’ process of creation. Why does that horn go there? What does this violin solo accomplish? What would one more note here or one fewer note there mean?
The closest we get to this is in listening to Williams talk about his famed five-note composition for the climax of Close Encounters. He shows the camera a music sheet with 20-30 different five-note combinations and points at the circled one, buried innocuously at 15 or 16. That’s the one they used. He then demonstrates the difference a single note makes in the sequence and briefly explains the emotional effect of completing a musical phrase in different ways. This is gold, and I wish the film had space for more sequences like this.
Similarly, there is a good section of the film devoted to Williams’ time as the principal conductor of the Boston Pops, a tenure that proved somewhat controversial due to the perceived illegitimacy of film music. Williams did a lot to break down that barrier, and the film rightly credits him for that specific cultural shift.
These tangible impacts are what the movie needs more of to be fully rewarding. We understand inherently the ephemeral nature of Williams’ work, so deeply rooted in nostalgia for our childhoods and the cultural artifacts we cherished then and still hold dear now. What might give this film some depth is a deeper exploration of that nostalgia. Ultimately, Music by John Williams is like a really delicious cake. It’s sweet and satisfying and you greatly enjoy it as you consume it, but it’s not as nourishing as a full meal.
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