You start the thing thinking, eight hours? You end it thinking, I wish there were eight more. Peter Jackson’s new documentary Get Back traces not quite the end of the Beatles: a few weeks in January 1969 where the four exhausted boys tried to hammer out a new album, and mostly failed. I won’t try to summarize it, because what is there to summarize? They play, they scrap a little bit, they make up, they play more, they get annoyed at Paul (unfairly), they get annoyed at Paul (fairly). But what they mostly do is laugh and joke around like old friends. The cliff notes version of this story, told in the 1970 film Let it Be, based on the same set of footage, focusses mainly on the friction between the members of this disintegrating group. This one lets you feel all the love they had for each other, even at this late hour.
The visual upgrades that the grotty 16mm film gets work wonderfully, most of the time. Yes, they do Motion Smoothe Ringo, which is unfortunate, but what they mostly do is help the medium get out of the way. They make it all a bit more present, a bit more ordinary. And then you have four very likable lads in a room together having tea and toast and doing funny voices. I had mixed to negative feelings about Jackson’s last project, the Great War (4K edition) doc They Shall Not Grow Old. What’s different here is that the subject matter is a little less serious, and so there’s no need to get too exercised, you can just enjoy the clear sound and picture.
For such well trodden ground, there are many surprises. John for all his faults is genuinely funny throughout, and softer to his bandmates than might be expected. Paul is a genius, but a dictator too. You could count George’s smiles on two hands, just about. One of Ringo’s chief contributions is to announce in the middle of a serious discussion that he has farted. Billy Preston deserves to be included in the pantheon of fifth Beatles. And as someone who reflexively defended Yoko for many years, well, the less said about her presence the better.
Moody though he may have been, it’s hard not to feel sorry for George, younger, less confident and above all, one against two. Even as McCartney and Lennon were drifting apart, they were still Lennon/McCartney: a unit of one that churned out some of the most accomplished music of the 20th century. Paul nags him, John kindly condescends, and his exit feels inevitable. He simply had the misfortune to be a genius in a band that was already at capacity.
There is great pathos to be found in the long lingering faces of the surrounding cast. The genial manager Mal, the suave George Martin, the Orson Welles lookalike and everyone else. The terrible knowledge we have of what happens next feels written on their faces. They watch as the project of the last ten years comes to an exhausted close. And we wonder if, with a little break, a little rest, a little less pressure or a little more understanding, it could all have been avoided. Was there another Beatles album to be made? Or five? Or were we always destined to get what we got: some solo music that occasionally glinted but never shone.
Then the rooftop scene comes and people start milling about in the street below, mostlly pleasantly surprised by this burst of surprising sunlight in a grey English January. Above the solid, drab grey wool of the average businessman, the Beatles look like they’ve come from the future. The only people to object, besides the cops (hilariously both called PC Ray) are the most Tory looking fuckers you’ve ever seen in your life. The Beatles, they say, are simply disrupting the Local Business of the street. A respectable geezer straight out of central casting on the other hand says that he likes very much their hair, their style, and he certainly wouldn’t mind his daughter marrying one of them. There are, even among the faithful, a sucession of repressed smiles, as if to express too much joy might land you in some Victorian prison.
What will stick with me is the most banal point of all: that John and Paul were made for each other. Their talents lay in large part inside the other, and when that connection was sundered they never could quite do it again. Many years ago when working a terrible job checking cars in a hospital car park I downloaded the entire Beatles discography and would listen to it, start to finish, on repeat, for weeks at a time. Of course I cried at that last performance of Two of Us. Theirs was the ability to transform the ordinary into the exciting, the cloud into the sun, the grey into the light.
You and I have memories
Longer than the road that stretches out ahead
Two of us wearing raincoats, standing solo
In the sun
You and me chasing paper, getting nowhere
On our way back home
We're on our way home
We're on our way home
We're going home
And I still like Maxwell’s Silver Hammer.
Extras/Would Recommend
Reading: Battleborn - Claire Vaye Watkins, 2012
Listening: The Beatles, obviously