Time travel for baby boomers has arrived in this four-hour
long documentary about George Harrison and the Beatles. It’s an excursion worth
taking, through music, vintage film clips, and interview excerpts featuring Beatles
themselves, Eric Clapton, Ravi Shankar, and a whole host of artistic
compatriots, journalists, business types, and important women in their lives, including
Harrison’s wife, Olivia, also documentary co-producer, and their son Dhani.
Is four hours too long? Maybe so, but this is the Beatles we’re talkin’ about here, and this is Scorsese, too, who must have had access to miles more excellent film footage, some never before available to the general public.
To its credit, the documentary has not been organized
strictly chronologically but with the goal of unfolding a portrait of Harrison that
points to his central role in the artistic development and innovation of the Beatles’
evolving music. The film ranges over time and topics from the
group’s origin, early successes, response to popularity, to group’s
interpersonal dynamics, and Harrison’s spirituality in personal life and the way it translated into the music. Biographical bookends deliver just enough
details about early and late years, as well as untimely demise.
I have to confess that one of my favorite moments (it made me laugh) features a brief cultural anthropology lesson by a journalist Scorsese doesn’t identify. Wrapped expertly front and back in Harrison’s “If I Needed Someone” (a song that conveys a boy’s unattainability and therefore desirability), the following quote is both as fitting and ungainly as the adolescent girls it describes: “This [rock and roll] is largely an appeal to the feminine heart, the heart of a young girl who worships love and the goddess of love and the heroes of love. This plays the dominant part in her life so the vast majority of the fans are girls who come to worship at the shrine of the goddess and of the young god hero as they did in the ancient past.” Curiously, it isn’t a Beatle sitting in on this interview; it is a young Mick Jagger. The quote continues: “I’ve seen this with a most dramatic intensity when the Beatles played two or three thousand young girls [Jagger licks his lips] in Manchester. Apart from another journalist I was the only male in the audience and I had never experienced anything like it myself. If I were confronted with ten thousand Loch Ness monsters [Jagger smirks and lights a cigarette], I wouldn’t be as impressed as by the whistling and wailing and possession of the soul of these young girls…”
As a former twelve year-old small town girl who jostled for a place on the living room floor, vying with my teenaged sister’s friends
for good sightline of our black and white TV, that I might partake of the communal
hysteria, I think this journalist was probably, unfortunately, in a way, quite
right. Though the "shrine of the goddess" is a bit of a stretch....
