The period covered by “Get Back” is just 22 days (not counting weekend days off), which Jackson documents in strict chronological order, day by day, so that we feel we’re leafing through the Beatles’ diary, with arresting details on every page. They still speak their own language and revel in their power and magic. In a funny way, it’s still a version of the bond they radiated in the fantasy kingdoms of “A Hard Day’s Night,” “Help!” and “Yellow Submarine” - the sense they had of being spiritually joined, of floating above the world, beyond the reach of others. The vibe that links them is boisterous and unmistakable. “Get Back” does indeed present the Beatles as a close-knit group of showman-gods who never stopped clowning around or loving each other.
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The publicity for the documentary has been dominated by the idea that it’s going to present a more upbeat vision of the Beatles than the gloomy, end-of-an-era, swan-song-of-a-group one that was showcased - and mythologized - in “Let It Be.” At the same time, that publicity has given rise to the fear and trepidation, on the part of any number of Beatles fans, that “Get Back” might turn out to be a kind of Paul-and-Ringo-approved whitewash: a movie that would replace the desultory myth of “Let It Be” with a reductive smiley-face version of the late-period Beatles as happy campers.Īs it turns out, the finished film transcends both the hype and the fan anxiety. “Get Back” is an epic hangout documentary, assembled by Jackson out of 60 hours of film footage, and 150 hours of audio recordings, shot over the course of that fateful January. “Get Back” is a long-form portrait of the dissolution of the Beatles and the togetherness of the Beatles.
As you soak up the film in its totality, it become moving and momentous. Yet even the repetition is part of the documentary’s experiential quality. There are moments when “Get Back” meanders (at a certain point in Part 3, you may feel like you never want to hear “Don’t Let Me Down” or “Let It Be” again). We’re there in the studio, right alongside the Beatles, seeing - living - what they do. What’s startling about “Get Back” is that as you watch it, drinking in the moment-to-moment reality of what it was like for the Beatles as they toiled away on their second-to-last studio album, the film’s accumulation of quirks and delights and boredom and exhilaration becomes more than fascinating it becomes addictive. We see them horsing around and smoking like chimneys, singing the numbers they’re working on in mock accents worthy of Monty Python, chortling over gossip columns about themselves that they read out like reports from Mars, trading bits and pieces of their history with the driest of winks, not to mention their constant playing of old rock ‘n’ roll songs, including some of the ones they wrote when they were 15, as they try to work their way of the creative rut they seem to be stuck in. “Get Back,” however, invites us to eavesdrop on the Beatles with a whole new micro level of voyeuristic engagement.
In that film, we saw bits of their process, their camaraderie, their acrimony, their exultation. We’ve seen the Beatles with their hair down before, of course - in “ Let It Be,” the original 80-minute documentary that was put together, in 1970, out of these same sessions. “The Beatles: Get Back” is an eight-hour documentary, shown in three parts (starting Thanksgiving Day) on Disney Plus, that consists, to a large degree, of 1,000 moments you might have expected to be left on the cutting-room floor.
What’s on it is all the stuff that wasn’t lively or punchy or resonant or dramatic enough to make it into the finished film. In the world of movies, and the world of documentaries in particular, there’s a place known as the cutting-room floor. The song hasn’t been named yet, but “Get Back” suddenly exists in the universe. He’s pushing out the melody as if it were being born. Then, just like that, with the guitar beat driving from below, his voice inches up two notes, to the sixth and seventh. Over the guitar, he improvises in a high voice, but he’s only singing one note - the note that will become “Jojo was a man…” For a minute or two, he noodles around on that note he’s got a groove, a feeling, but not a song.
John Lennon hasn’t come into the studio yet, and Paul McCartney, sitting around in one of his natty sweaters (this one is yellow), starts playing his bass guitar as if it were a regular guitar, strumming out a familiar propulsive rhythm. But on the morning of day four, a spark ignites. So far, the Beatles aren’t making much headway.