The other three are in a huddle, eye to eye, fur to fur, at ground level. His face, his melancholy deadpan, is a permanent reaction shot. You find yourself thinking a lot about Ringo during Get Back, because he is the quietest and the stillest, and the most camera-aware. Read: What the Beatles sounded like unedited There is a sensation, too, of money flying out of the corners of every frame-Beatle money, Apple money, sacks of it, just flying out the window. Lindsay-Hogg expresses a need to be “flexible … about every aspect of the enterprise,” that perennial ’60s air of half-baked possibility/potential compounded here by the fact that, as the Beatles, they basically can do anything they want: hire a cruise ship, build a rocket, take over a hill in the middle of North London, commandeer the world’s television networks for a couple of hours. “Because Ringo just said he doesn’t want to go abroad.”) Or perhaps on London’s Primrose Hill? Ideas float and expire: The vagueness is enervating. The drift is pervasive: What are they actually doing in Twickenham? If a concert is what they’re working toward, a live show that will also deliver the hoped-for climax of Lindsay-Hogg’s film, where exactly will that show be? In a Roman amphitheater in Libya? (“I think you’ll find we’re not going abroad,” Paul says. Epstein.” There is talk of “grumpiness” and “doldrums” and jokes about getting divorced from one another.
It’s been 15 months since the death of the band’s visionary manager, and as the movie begins the boys are lamenting quite candidly the drift they’ve suffered since the loss of the man they call “Mr. January 1969 is not a great moment for the Beatles. Watching the whole thing, should you choose to do so, will be a tune-up for your negative capability-John Keats’s term for tolerating “uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” The Beatles are on the Twickenham soundstage (miserable), then they’re in the Apple studio (less miserable), then they’re on the roof (amazing): That’s the narrative arc. “At the moment we’ve got a movie about smokers, nose-pickers, and nail-biters.”įrom the nearly 60 hours of footage and 100-plus of audio produced by the Let It Be sessions, Jackson has quarried the almost eight hours of Get Back: That’s almost eight hours of symphonic tedium and fiddly revelation, of sitting around and diddling about, with a culminating blast of blinding Beatle-joy as the band plays its gig-its last gig-on the roof of the Apple Corps offices.
“I don’t know what story I’m telling anymore,” he announces at one point.
And he too is being filmed: young and round-faced, clean-shaven amid the lusciously hairy Beatles, puffing on a cigar, keeping his cool (just about). He’s filming everything, without knowing-in the pure vérité style-quite what he’s filming. Because while the Beatles are Beatling around on their soundstage, the director Michael Lindsay-Hogg is making or trying to make what will eventually become the unloved documentary Let It Be, to be released in 1970 after the band has broken up. Peter Jackson’s The Beatles: Get Back, released in three episodes on Disney+, is a film about the Beatles, but it’s also a film about a film. So they’re scuffing through songs bantering giggling eating sandwiches drinking tea drinking wine drinking something orange drinking something tomato-colored looking heavily drugged (Lennon) looking beadily alert (also Lennon) ignoring one another indulging one another eyeballing one another having earnest, shrouded, passive-aggressive circular Liverpudlian conversations regarding the future (or not) of their band. Or are these, in fact, laboratory conditions for the dissolution of a creative unit? Kill or cure, maybe. McCartney, it seems, had a notion that a process like this would get them back to basics, put the estranged Beatles back in touch with one another. Or get some songs together for a live show. Marooned in this quasi-industrial environment, the Beatles are trying-insane proposition-to write an album.
Everybody’s watching, everybody’s listening: nosy cameras, nudging mics, cables and crew members all over the place.
Planes of shifting color light up the white screens behind them, viridescent splodges and blooms of moody fuchsia, as if they’re trapped at the end of a rainbow. “I think your beard suits you … man,” George says to Paul. They are of the ’60s and they are above the ’60s. They burble they dawdle they pick up their instruments and put them down again. What is happening to the Beatles? Whose idea was this? What is going on? It’s January 1969, and look at them: stuck on a soundstage in Twickenham Film Studios-the Beatles!-sitting around like a bunch of YouTubers, idly generating content.