"Beatles '64": Martin Scorsese achieves the impossible - makes the Beatles boring

By: Neil McCormick / The Daily Telegraph
Translation: Telegrafi.com

With his new and much talked about rock documentary, in Disney +, the great director Martin Scorsese has done something that few would have believed possible: he has made movies boring.

There is a significant moment in the film, when a pale 21-year-old Paul McCartney is interviewed by an ethical journalist, who asks him what impact he thinks the Beatles will have on history and culture. McCartney looks completely confused. "Culture? It's not culture! It's for fun"!

Well, there's a lot of culture in Scorsese's documentary, but not much fun.

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The reporter was on the right track, of course, and 60 years later, a graying, short-bearded McCartney is better able to discuss his band's historical and cultural impact as he leads a camera crew to an exhibition of photographs of from the group's first visit to America. “It was right after the Kennedy assassination; maybe America needed something like the Beatles, to bring it out of mourning and to tell it that life goes on."

With Scorsese as producer and directed by his longtime collaborator David Tedeschi (who worked as an editor on Scorsese's much better documentaries about Bob Dylan and George Harrison), Beatles '64 it is a very serious cinematic essay. It's packed to the brim with familiar and repurposed footage from the news and television, interspersed with interviews with senior figures who weigh in on generational changes in politics, feminism, and race relations—topics that anyone interested in he has heard them a million times before. A film about the Beatles that opens with two minutes of President Kennedy's speeches, while pop star Billie Eilish sings a somber version of All my loving, from the beginning has an excessive self-confidence.

The film is brought to life largely by the 16mm footage shot by Albert and David Maysles for their documentary of the time, What's Happening: The Beatles in the USA. The footage has been enhanced aurally and visually through techniques developed for Peter Jackson's magnum opus documentary, Get Back (2021), but I am not convinced that their recontextualization improves the original. One wonders why Disney and Apple did not simply decide to restore and expand that documentary, which was last released in 1991 as The First US Visit and is currently unavailable for streaming.

It's great fun to rewatch familiar footage of the Fantastic Four poking fun at the cameras, using funny voices or cracking jokes among themselves, almost unaffected by the surrounding media chaos. But this joy is constantly interrupted and overshadowed by old TV shows in which feminists explain that bitels represent a new model of masculinity, or by Marshall McLuhan discussing the impact of communication technology in the modern media age.

Get Back Jackson's returned the Beatles to a vibrancy that made them feel contemporary—a reality that matches our experience of their music, which refuses to be faded by the soundtrack of our time. Meanwhile, the focus of Beatles '64 in old black-and-white footage and elderly subjects wistfully reminiscing about their youth, it turns the group into a phenomenon of the distant past, into archaic creatures of a lost world.

But, this does not fully capture the feature of contrast. Here are John, Paul, George and Ringo, with their signature mop-top hair, dark suits, white shirts and ties, smoking non-stop and wading through the chaos of hysterical fans and pompous media attention. There are moments of stunning innocence, like the look of childlike joy on John Lennon's face when he puts on his headphones and laughs, saying, "You can hear your own voice talking"!

Yet somehow, the Beatles don't really seem young, perhaps because their personalities are so ingrained in popular culture that they've acquired a timeless aura. Literally, in the case of Ringo, who appears in interviews as an 84-year-old, he looked better than at the height of his career: full of vitality and showing the same humor. He reads a review of Newsweek1964, which describes the Beatniks as a "nightmare" with "tight, Edwardian beatnik-style costumes" and hair like "big bowls of pudding" playing music that "gives up secondary rhythms, harmony and melody".

As in the Maysles brothers' original film, the self-appointed male guardians of moral and cultural standards seem ridiculous, while the energy, charm and spirit of the young (mostly female) fans of the Beatles appear as a perfectly reasonable reaction to the arrival of an era of cloud. In the end, the Screaming Girls were on the right side of history, while the critics who disparaged the band's musical achievements have been forgotten. In an interview from the 90s of the XX century (reused from the series Beatles Anthology, which rightly needs an update), George Harrison observes: “We were kind of normal and the rest of the world was crazy. That's how it seemed to me." It's the impression the film ultimately reinforces – a charming quartet, gifted and modern archetype, rife with misunderstandings at a crazy moment in history.

If we're looking for a cultural commentary on the Beatles' influence, few interviews can compare to Lennon's own depth and articulateness in interviews from the 70s. He explains the theory that the British musical explosion of the 60s was the product of a "vacuum" created by the end of conscription. "We were the army that did not exist. And music came out of that." Lennon insists that the Beatles did not lead the change, but were part of it. "My imagination now is that it was a ship discovering the new world, and the starboards were at their highest point, and we just said, 'Land ahead'"!

There is an interesting moment when the 82-year-old McCartney recalls the insulting treatment during a reception at the British Embassy in Washington. "Somehow, we were used to it," he says with a shrug. "We are working-class boys, and when you face aristocrats, you think they will look down on you." But suddenly he rises, as if driven by a vengeful energy. "It didn't bother us at all!" - he says nervously. "They worked in an Embassy, ​​we were on tour doing rock"!

Beatles '64 aspires to address this culture clash, but fails to convey the unrestrained and defiant energy that the Beatles represented, perhaps due to the limitations of the source footage and interview format. The film only comes alive when the characters are on the screen. It seems like a better movie exists inside this one and is fighting to get out. Maybe it's the original Maysles Brothers movie. /Telegraph/