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The Beatles: Get Back Review – Needlessly Long Docuseries Undermines The Music
Peter Jackson's three-part documentary series, The Beatles: Get Back, is a spiritual successor of the Michael Lindsay-Hogg 1970 documentary Let It Be, an 80-minute feature film that — both at the time of release and when viewed retrospectively — divided critics. Like Let It Be, Jackson's Get Back offers a "fly-on-the-wall" look at this point in Beatles history. Unlike the 1970 documentary, however, Jackson's version is almost eight hours long. While the vividly restored footage in the docuseries offers a fascinating glimpse at the inner life of highly influential musicians at the top of their game, the approach also sorely lacks clear narrative threads, stakes, and context. In general, The Beatles: Get Back documentary proves once again that Jackson's meticulous approach to filmmaking is impressive but excessive, suggesting the director has lost touch with what audiences actually enjoy.
The Beatles: Get Back is far too long. The television series' content is almost exclusively the footage of John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr during the "Get Back" sessions, in which the group wrote, arranged, and rehearsed the songs that would make up the last two The Beatles albums, Abbey Road and Let It Be. Like the 1970 documentary, there are no talking head sections, no interviews, and no narration. Jackson does include unobtrusive subtitles for the muddled-sounding conversations, and occasionally to provide basic context for what's happening onscreen (there are also a few moments of artistic intervention, like a montage of newspaper clippings to represent the political climate at the time). It feels like an organic approach to hyper-realism — putting the audience into the action to experience what it was "really" like to live through. Yet, given how infamously unpleasant the "Get Back" sessions were for those involved, Jackson is effectively inviting Beatles fans to share in one of the band's darkest periods without any sort of emotional payoff or catharsis at the end.
Peter Jackson undeniably has one of the best eyes in Hollywood today, and his devotion to preserving history via film — whether that be the restoration work in the First World War documentary They Shall Not Grow Old or his recreation of the famously lost spider pit scene from the original 1933 King Kong — is admirable. Jackson brings that same loving touch to The Beatles: Get Back, restoring hours of grainy, muted documentary footage into clear, bright, and vibrant scenes. Even the audio sounds great. There are countless moments in isolation within The Beatles: Get Back that are pure joy to watch. The scenes of The Beatles jamming, creating together, and just generally goofing off are captivating; if nothing else, the documentary serves to remind audiences of how exceptionally talented the musicians were (and are).
Yet, a significant amount of the runtime in The Beatles: Get Back is dedicated to showing the mundane: passive-aggressive squabbling between bandmates; countless scenes of McCartney talking to various technicians and engineers; and even several shots of Lennon, Harrison, and Starr yawning, reading newspapers, and generally looking bored. It's obvious that Jackson made Get Back for major Beatles fans — very little is explained, and the series expects the audience to grasp the significance of figures like Allen Klein and Glynn Johns. But even for those familiar with the band and the history of Let It Be, more contextual information is desperately needed. The audience members are voyeurs, spying on the sessions from afar, thus lacking the insight to understand the motivation behind the various actions and decisions.
A key issue with The Beatles: Get Back is the general approach to the material. Because Jackson has effectively just condensed the events in January 1969 to vignettes representing each day, presenting the series in a purely chronological structure, there are no clear narrative threads. Simply put, the "fly-on-the-wall" approach fails to translate in a meaningful way because the audience isn't actually privy to the inner workings of the band, and there are no arcs or progressions that are immediately clear. For example, roughly halfway through episode 2 — which is more than four hours into the documentary — Jackson includes a subtitle noting that the band hasn't released a single in five months. This implies that the group was feeling pressure to publish new material, and indeed they did end up releasing "Get Back" as a single in April 1969. If this was the lens through which to view the sessions, however, then why is it presented four hours into the series? Those stakes — assuming they were indeed a factor in the declining dynamic within the band — should have been clear from the start.
The sheer volume of content in The Beatles: Get Back makes parsing through the series an exhausting experience, even for those who are exceptionally interested in both The Beatles and the music industry in general. More than anything, Get Back is a frustrating example of wasted potential. The nearly eight hours of runtime is split arbitrarily between three episodes, each of which is longer than most feature films. Scattered throughout are glimmers of what the documentary could have been: seeing Paul McCartney play "Let It Be" for the band for the first time, or hearing the group laugh uproariously at one of John Lennon's off-collar jokes — these are beautiful moments worth highlighting. George Harrison quietly quitting the band part-way through the Twickenham Studios sessions, then being convinced to return by Lennon and McCartney, should have felt like a major moment in Get Back; yet, it doesn't.
Unfortunately, the noteworthy elements of The Beatles: Get Back are buried in excessive minutiae. The long length of each episode means that individual moments, like Harrison's exit, get lost. The constant, mumbling conversations are dull, and the thrill of seeing the young Beatles in such vivid color only goes so far. The documentary succeeds partially in challenging the notion that the band recorded Let It Be in a hostile environment, but at the end of the day, viewers are still watching the slow death of the band. The Beatles: Get Back may offer a true-to-life look at the beloved musical group, but it fails to celebrate its central figures.
The Beatles: Get Back releases on Disney+ consecutively on November 25, 26 and 27, 2021.
