The Beatles: Get Back is really a documentary about friendship and how people change

Gawker

Peter Jackson's docuseries understands something simple, obvious, yet overlooked, says Jeremy Gordon. "There’s a much lauded, more obvious truth uncovered in Jackson’s extended edition: The Beatles were not actually at constant wit’s end, but friendly all along," says Gordon. "They bickered a lot, and some of the rehearsals seemed to go nowhere, and everyone got pissy with Paul (who definitely deserved it), but for the most part they come off like what they were: lifelong pals with a profound and irreplicable intimacy, who were nonetheless a little testy with each other. Not unlike your friend group, perhaps, except none of your homies wrote 'Hey Jude.' What it also reveals — through the power of footage that appears continuous but of course has been edited to privilege Jackson’s perspective — is why the Beatles were always designed to break up. You can imagine a timeline where Phil Spector doesn’t ruin Let It Be with his goopy orchestration, and the band doesn’t enter a disastrous financial partnership with scheming manager Allen Klein. But just as the Lennon-McCartney partnership animated their success, the sway it holds in Get Back over every other facet of their existence forecasts their eventual dissolution. Best mates since their teen years, John and Paul’s friendship is a familiar stew of shared intimacies (John and Paul patiently working out a song as they stand face to face), jealousies (Paul jockeying for John’s attention when Yoko is around), passions (the visible joy they derive from performing together), and above all inside jokes they still fall back into, even during this uneasy time. One of my favorite scenes is when they run through the pastoral buddy jaunt 'Two of Us' for what feels like the hundredth time, only this time they adopt stupid German accents through gritted teeth and bug out their eyes like Muppets. It’s bizarrely sweet, and they also look like f*cking dorks, which is a funny thing to say about the two most famous musicians in the world at that point in time." There is one scene, says Gordon, that "made me think about every attempt I’ve ever made at rationalizing the demise of a friendship I’d hitherto considered to be bronzed for all eternity, and the thousands of invisible nuances the mind can invent when the truth is embarrassingly simple: People change, and that change is neither good nor bad, only a natural byproduct of our unfortunate shackling to the linear progression of time. The way Jackson chooses to linger on Paul’s watery eyes is emotionally effective filmmaking, but it also underscores how he’s conceived of friendship throughout his career: as a powerful bonding force that almost borders on lust. Just as Juliet and Pauline fall into a murderously intimate death spiral in Heavenly Creatures, and Samwise Gamgee subjugates his entire identity in service of getting Frodo to Mordor in The Lord of the Rings, so is Paul obviously willing to do anything to make John stay."

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• In Get Back, Yoko Ono is a performance artist at the height of her powers: "At first I found Ono’s omnipresence in the documentary bizarre, even unnerving," says Amanda Hess. "The vast set only emphasizes the ludicrousness of her proximity. Why is she there? I pleaded with my television set. But as the hours passed, and Ono remained — painting at an easel, chewing a pastry, paging through a Lennon fan magazine — I found myself impressed by her stamina, then entranced by the provocation of her existence and ultimately dazzled by her performance. My attention kept drifting toward her corner of the frame. I was seeing intimate, long-lost footage of the world’s most famous band preparing for its final performance, and I couldn’t stop watching Yoko Ono sitting around, doing nothing...The Beatles: Get Back is being read by some as an exculpatory document — proof that Ono was not responsible for destroying the Beatles ... Her presence has been described as gentle, quiet and unimposing. Indeed, she is not the set’s most meddlesome interloper: That is Michael Lindsay-Hogg, the hapless director of the original documentary Let It Be, who keeps urging the band to stage a concert in an ancient amphitheater in Libya or perhaps at a hospital for children suffering from reassuringly minor ailments. And yet there is something depressing about the recasting of Ono as a quiet, inconspicuous lump of a person. Of course her appearance in the studio is obtrusive. The fact that she is not there to directly influence the band’s recordings only makes her behavior more ridiculous. To deny this is to sap her of her power. From the beginning, Ono’s presence feels intentional. Her gauzy black outfit and flowing, center-parted hair lend her a tent-like appearance; it is as if she is setting up camp, carving out space in the band’s environment."
• Let It Be director Michael Lindsay-Hogg on watching Get Back: “I was very interested to see how Peter put Get Back together,” he says of Peter Jackson. “It’s like mine was a short story and his was a full-length novel. They each have different qualities, but I feel both can exist together. Peter has been very supportive of that and offered us the same equipment he pioneered in making his movie. The original DP, Tony Richman, and I have been working on the print, and it’s much lighter and doesn’t have the problems with the image being cut off for showing on TV. People are still living on confused memories of what was happening back then. Let It Be is not a breakup movie. We finished it long before things blew up. It’s a joyous movie when they were happy, performing on a rooftop. It’s f*cking great.”
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