BEFORE: I've been looking for a way to work this one in, and since the title mentions the material world, it seems OK to include this after a film about economics. (OK, maybe not, but work with me here...) This is a long documentary, running almost three and a half hours, but a few years ago when I was home with the flu, I watched that other documentary about Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, and that was 4 hours long, so I know I can do it. I'll just have to watch half of it at the office while working, and the other half at home tonight.
Linking from "Freakonomics", Melvin Van Peebles was also in "Posse" with Isaac Hayes, who was also in "Blues Brothers 2000" with Billy Preston.
THE PLOT: Friends, family and associates of the musician tell the story of his life and how spirituality became such a major part of it.
FOLLOW-UP TO: "Nowhere Boy" (Movie #1,268)
AFTER: For such a high-profile person as George Harrison, could there even BE any aspect of his life that wasn't already documented, turned into trivia, or covered in one of dozens of Beatle bio-pics?
Turns out, yes. But not in the first half, which was mostly a rehash of information that has been covered in other films, such as "The Compleat Beatles" or "The Beatles Anthology".
For anyone who thought of George as just along for the ride, and perhaps taking a backseat to the more prolific songwriting team of Lennon and McCartney, this film seeks to prove otherwise - though it looks like John and Paul threw George a bone by just giving him one song per album in the early days, Harrison really came into his own with all of the sitar music on "Sgt. Pepper", and then after the White Album it seems like he really came into his own. Try to imagine the "Abbey Road" album without "Here Comes the Sun" and "Something" - really, what have you got then? Take away those two songs, and the whole structure of the album would collapse. You'd be left with "Come Together" and a bunch of nonsense songs like "Octopus' Garden" and "Mean Mr. Mustard".
Now it seems to me like George was really getting his shit together as a songwriter, just as the team of Lennon & McCartney was falling apart. Similarly, try to imagine the White Album without "While My Guitar Gently Weeps", and what have you got? OK, maybe "Back in the U.S.S.R." and "Dear Prudence", "I Will" and "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da", but so much of the rest is crap - "Bungalow Bill"? "Wild Honey Pie"? "Revolution No. 9"? For another band, maybe, but by Beatles standards, crapity crap crap.
All one has to do is look at Harrison's first solo album, "All Things Must Pass", produced by Phil Spector, who apparently was still hanging around Abbey Road after destroying the "Let it Be" album. It's a TRIPLE album, containing all of the songs he'd written in the last few years of the Beatles sessions, that never made it to their LP's. OK, maybe every song on it isn't a gem, but "My Sweet Lord" and "What Is Life" are solid, solid songs, and "Isn't It a Pity" and "All Things Must Pass" show that the guy had a lot on his mind that he wanted to get out there.
But then we've got the second half of the film, which kicks off with the breakup of his famous group, and concentrates on George's life A.B. Once he started getting his own records out, then there was the Concert for Bangladesh (precursor to Live-Aid, really the first rock charity thing ever) and his own record label, tours and associations with the Traveling Wilburys.
If you do a portrait of anyone, you might find that they're a study in contrasts - and that certainly applies to Harrison. Known as the "quiet" Beatle for several years, it seems like he really found his voice in the 1970's, promoting meditation and calling for world peace. And of course financially he was well-off, but he seemed very concerned with the spiritual world and Eastern religion. Perhaps only those who are financially well-to-do can spend so much time seeking inner peace.
Then we've got Harrison's third act, his career as a film producer. He stepped in to save the Monty Python film "Life of Brian" when the financing collapsed over the fear of religious blasphemy, and then his company, Handmade Films, went on to make 23 other films, including one of my personal favorites, "Time Bandits". I never really made much of the connection between the Beatles and the Pythoners before - perhaps because Harrison was the only connection - but they were both groups of Brits (mostly, except Gilliam) who wrote together and hung out together and even fought together, but produced (mostly) great work.
I think you have to walk a fine line with a documentary portrait - you can just quote dates and events, this guy did this, then he met this person, in this year he released this album - which is much too factual and dry. Or you can have friends and family tell a bunch of anecdotes about someone, so you might get a better sense of his personality. This film tends to favor the second approach over the first, but I still sort of feel like George Harrison was a bit of a tough nut to crack. I admire the guy, but I'm not sure I know him that much better after watching the documentary than I did before.
But I understand making a portrait film like this amounts to a series of choices - what do you leave in, and what do you end up cutting? What presents the best portrait of the man? They left in the time a fan broke into George Harrison's house and stabbed him, plus great detail about George's wife falling in love with Clapton, and the arguments with McCartney during the Twickenham sessions - all of which represent questionable choices. No mention of various awards like the O.B.E., barely explaining his association with auto racing, being a vegetarian long before McCartney was, or any real details about his illness. I guess they couldn't make the thing four hours long in the end.
Also starring Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, Eric Clapton, Olivia Harrison, Dhani Harrison, Pattie Boyd, Klaus Voormann, Astrid Kutcher, George Martin, Jane Birkin, Yoko Ono, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle (last seen in "Nuns on the Run"), Phil Spector, Tom Petty, Jackie Stewart, Jim Keltner.
RATING: 6 out of 10 guitar solos
At times I need to remind myself that the purpose of a documentary is to represent truth as the filmmaker sees it...not objective truth and not the complete picture. I thought this one skipped over a couple of topics that seemed important (his drug use? his infidelities?). But it represents everything that his family and friends feel is important to know about George Harrison. And if they don't know...who does?
ReplyDelete(I particularly liked Harrison's story about visiting San Francisco at the height of Flower Power. In 1969, Harrison had been working very hard at a career for 18 hours a day, 7 days a week since he was a teenager, creating great art and also becoming very successful. I can imagine how he felt when he met so many people of his generation who only wanted to get high and cavort in muddy fields.)