‘The Beatles: Get Back’ Is Epic In Length But Intimate In Its Portrayal Of A Group Fracturing At The Seams

Two weeks ago I asked “Is there anything left to say about the Beatles that hasn’t already been said?” in my review 1964’s A Hard Day’s Night. Now, EVERYONE’s talking about the Beatles again for the first time since…well, probably Ron Howard’s 2016 documentary The Beatles: Eight Days a Week – The Touring Years. Over Thanksgiving weekend, The Beatles: Get Back dropped like an atomic bomb on Disney+ and the world is once again infected with Beatlemania, albeit in a very 2021 fashion; listening parties and album premieres having been replaced with Twitter threads, memes and Pinterest boards of their wonderfully dated wardrobe.

Running nearly 8 hours in length over three episodes, Get Back was directed by Peter Jackson of Lord of the Rings fame and assembled from over 60 hours of film and 150 hours of audio recordings. A comparatively small portion of this material was previously seen in Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s 1970 film Let It Be and heard on the album of the same name. Released a month after the Beatles’ official breakup, both are rather dour affairs that portrayed the band at their most acrimonious and uninspired. Get Back, in contrast, paints a more nuanced and thorough picture of a group struggling through personal and artistic growing pains while tirelessly endeavoring to write, record and perform a new album of material in a month’s time.

The Beatles famously retreated to the studio in 1966. Excited by a live taping to promote their 1968 single “Hey Jude,” the group decided to record their next album in front of a live audience. Writing sessions and rehearsals were filmed in anticipation of the final concert, which would then be broadcast as a television special. Watching the group’s equipment being set up on a cold and cavernous film soundstage, one would not be wrong to think this is the perfect environment for a young rock band to implode. “I don’t think this is a very acoustically good place,” says guitarist George Harrison, one of many practical observations of his which will be duly ignored along with his songwriting, leading him to quit the group seven days into rehearsals. “If he doesn’t come back by Tuesday, we get (Eric) Clapton,” responds John Lennon at the news, capping Get Back’s first episode.

Harrison is persuaded to rejoin the following week but tensions remain. Having started as teenagers, the four Beatles had grown into very different men. Paul McCartney is the most disciplined, sometimes overwhelming his bandmates with a plethora of musical ideas and suggestions. Lennon had a comparative dearth of new material and often seems checked out. Harrison, the group’s youngest member, felt constrained by only being afforded two songs per album. Ringo, who had briefly quit the band the previous year, serves as their emotional center and peacemaker. Lurking in the shadows were business disputes, drug addiction and the trauma of manager Brian Epstein’s sudden death 16 months earlier.     

Even if the storm clouds that would rip the band apart are visible on the horizon, Get Back shows that at the time of filming, in January 1969, the Beatles were still very much a band of brothers. There are disagreements but voices are never raised and the group’s camaraderie is apparent. John and Paul, always painted as the dueling extremes of the band’s character, seem united in their concern for their bandmates and delight in collaboration, exchanging admiring glances after nailing a vocal harmony or guitar part. From a fan’s perspective, it’s fascinating to watch them bounce around song ideas that would show up on their solo records. Yes, Yoko is a somewhat obtrusive presence but let’s not forget, it was John who insisted she be there. I can’t fathom how bored she must have been the entire time. Even Paul defends her. 

Due to scheduling constraints and a lack of consensus, the Beatles live album performance is reduced to a set of five new songs, some performed multiple times, performed on the roof of Apple Corps, the group’s record label and management company. Having endured seven hours of build up, it’s a pretty big payoff when they finally plug-in and rock the fuck out in the film’s final 49 minutes. The group plays with an excitement and joy missing up until that moment and attract an enthusiastic and unsuspecting crowd of office workers, chimney sweepers and members of London’s Metropolitan Police Service. Watching them play, you can’t help wonder what might have been had they put their differences aside and toured in the era of modern sound systems, just then starting to emerge.  

Rivaling Jackson’s Middle Earth trilogies in length, Get Back is not easy viewing, not even for a musician and Beatles fan like myself. If you were ever curious about the utter boredom of songwriting, recording, and simply being in a rock band, at the end of the film’s 468 minutes, you will be an expert. If Jackson had merely edited out half the false musical starts and bad cover songs, he could have shaved off an hour and still captured the song writing process and driven home the salient point that the Beatles still had fun together. It’s the curse of the modern age that everything we watch must be either a 3 minute YouTube video or a 10-episode Netflix series we passively binge on autoplay. Jackson could have told the same story, better, in less time.  

Despite its faults, Get Back remains a remarkable viewing experience. Both epic and intimate, it allows the viewer a once in a lifetime opportunity to be a fly on the wall as one of the most important musical acts of all-time create a new album out of thin air, amidst significant personal turmoil and professional pressure. Perhaps most importantly, it humanizes the Beatles and dispels the myths of their ultimate end. Because of their outsize importance, artistically, culturally, personally, we want to believe there was some cataclysm or super villain responsible for the Beatles break up rather than the very mundane, very understandable reason that four young men who grew up together became adults and grew apart.

Benjamin H. Smith is a New York based writer, producer and musician. Follow him on Twitter: @BHSmithNYC.

Watch Get Back on Disney+