The Beatles: Get Back
Directed by Peter Jackson
Running time: 7hrs48 | REVIEWED BY CATHERINE BRAY
Starring The Beatles
It’s a very unusual person who has no experience of collaborating with someone else. Whether you’ve played a make-believe game with your child, assembled a complicated piece of flatpack furniture with a partner, been part of a committee, planned a holiday with a group of friends — or perhaps something less mundane? Say, writing and performing some of the all-time greatest music in the world?
Though I agree their music is mostly excellent, I don’t know a massive amount about The Beatles, and some of the songs here were totally new to me. I mention this by way of demonstrating that this film (or miniseries; it’s kind of both) isn’t just a curio for die-hards. Seen as an exploration of the process of collaboration, I was enthralled by it.
There is no narrator overtly explaining that what we’re doing here is interrogating the creative process, mind you, but that’s very much what unfolds. The viewer becomes a fly on the wall as the Beatles plan, improvise and problem-solve. Their genius is in what they produced, but the really funny thing is that their process looks like any old collaboration.
There are giggly bits, bits where they’re flying along, in the zone. Bits where they’re stuck, and sulk or resort to passive aggression. There are moments that are the goal of all collaborations, where everyone is somehow magically in sync, and moments where each collaborator is adding piece by piece to the whole in a way that seems predestined. The parts where they are problem-solving are perhaps the most compelling, for me. The film also elucidates clearly but tacitly the way that creative work always involves bits that don’t look like work. When the band starting riffing on the Harry Lime theme from The Third Man, they’re not getting their new material written — except that they are. It’s all part of it. This kind of playfulness threads through almost every constructive collaboration, and it’s heartening to see it given such space and time.
THE BEATLES: GET BACK (2021) Shot by Anthony B. Richmond | Edited by Jabez Olssen
The Beatles: Get Back is out now on BluRay and available to stream on Disney+
