The Beatles: Get Back Review: Peter Jackson Serves a Party for Superfans

Peter Jackson’s eight-hour Disney Plus documentary series The Beatles: Come back, an extended behind-the-scenes account of the filming of leave it, features a specific scene that heralds The Beatles’ dissolution. It’s January 1969, and the group is desperately trying to craft their new song “Two of Us”. They are under enormous pressure. For this project, they have given themselves the task of writing and arranging 14 new songs to be recorded live, for a study audience, in two weeks. Cameras are there to capture their efforts. They also catch John Lennon and Paul McCartney walking together around the poor George Harrison, pushing any sonic space out to his guitar. Harrison leaves the band and puts the future of the inchoate album in jeopardy.

The Beatles – Lennon, McCartney, Harrison and Ringo Starr – originally hoped for the aptly titled project Come back would bring the band back to its roots. They would leave overdubs or studio numbers and rolled back on the ways of working in the studio that produced their most acclaimed albums, instead of a mere approach. These recording sessions have long been known as a miserable time for the band.

But Jackson has explored 60 hours of 16mm footage recorded by filmmaker Michael Lindsay-Hogg and 150 hours of audio to reveal a different reality. While annoyance and annoyance color every other minute, joy, laughter, and camaraderie do the same. Unfortunately, these nuggets, which recontextualize Beatles history, are not easy for Jackson to translate.

Come back opens with a ripping, randomly produced montage of The Beatles’ hits, mixed with clips of their career’s test stone – their fateful encounter, the beginning of the breathtaking Beatlemania, their debut on Ed Sullivan Show, the backlash against Lennon’s “greater than Jesus” quote. Jackson’s brief, elaborate summary of the band’s early career represents the lone olive branch he will offer casual or newer Beatles fans. The rest of the documentary’s eight hours are dedicated to hardcore – the kind of viewers who can spot every splice of a studio, every track without an album and all the songs the group has covered through their time together.

Come back tells about the meetings that led to the weakest study effort at the top of the band in the late career, leave it. Jackson reveals the band’s dynamics and introduces the main players and sharks circling in the water, leading to The Beatles’ death. He concludes with a testimony of their genius: the rooftop concert in 1969, which was their last concert as an official band. But Jacksons Come back is an exhausting endurance test, prone to repetition. Its fleeting rhapsodies of song-making overflow spontaneously with magic, but it was still not designed to win any new converts to The Beatles’ music.

The first segment of the series is the most formless. It’s a boring 157 minutes that can best be played in the background while mingling around the house. Here, The Beatles spend much of their time noodling around on their instruments and playing a myriad of covers like “Johnny B. Goode”, “Quinn the Eskimo”, “I Shall be Released” and so on. But what is it seductive at first Come back is its unlikely setting. Instead of opting for a classy recording studio, or at least somewhat closer to Abbey Road, the Beatles chose the sad, drafted movie soundtrack from Twickenham Studios. The band was temporarily given the seat, reserved to film the dark comedy The magical Christian (with Peter Sellers and Ringo Starr) from filmmaker Denis O’Dell.

Photo: Disney Plus

It’s almost comical to see the biggest band in the world made so small: their simple setup barely fills a corner of the studio, they have no recording equipment, and the acoustics in the room are awful. They rummage around in their incomplete melodies, first with fun, then with frustration.

Though the band meanders, the ghost of time constraints hangs over the cases. Not only have the band not written and arranged their songs yet, they have not even settled in a place where they are recording their TV special. (They kick around the Sabratha Amphitheater in Libya as an option). As for the group, Jackson is hesitant to push the action. The instructor gives up any hint of a discerning eye. Instead, he plays out every little detail of their time at Twickenham, disablingly edited by Jabez Olssen (The Hobbit trilogy). It all takes place in almost real time, with no regard for visibility.

Too often, Jackson relies on the sight and sound of songwriting to sustain audience investment. It’s exciting when half-finished well-known tracks arrive, like “I’ve Got a Feeling,” “Two of Us,” and “Get Back,” which McCartney presents to Harrison and Starr on bass. These songs are on the verge of something recognizable, but not yet the polished versions that are so at home in the ears of listeners. Hear tracks like “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer”, which would later appear on Abbey Road, or songs that would eventually appear in the band members’ solo material offer the same kind of joy. But the excitement of hearing classic tracks in their childhood diminishes when “I’ve Got a Feeling” is played with nausea. For everyone except the most avid Beatles researchers, the methodical, tedious process of making songs is simply tedious.

The best pockets in the first section, apart from the singing craft, arrive every time the band’s fragile dynamics are tested or illuminated. George Martin, The Beatles’ longtime producer – who was always the adult in the room but was put on the sidelines in favor of Glyn Johns during this process – describes exactly what plagues the group: Lennon and McCartney are always a team, while Harrison is usually alone. Jackson does not use this filled reality as a review. It just floats on the surface, like a lifeguard drifting away from a sinking man.

Come back gets greater traction in its second three-hour segment. The band leaves Twickenham Studios for the safe setting of their London headquarters. The all-encompassing sympathetic keyboardist, extraordinary Billy Preston, jumps on the sessions and rounds off the group’s extra sound. Their wives show up: Yoko Ono, Linda McCartney, Pattie Harrison and Maureen Starkey. The group becomes lively with renewed energy. Although the pressure from the press reporting on their disagreements and their competing business interests is starting to cause cracks, the playful footage suggests that the mythology that the band was offended during these sessions is overrated.

Come back often works best as a love story. Lennon and McCartney once lived inside each other’s pockets, but they are driven apart. Both hope this project will repair the wound between them by bringing them back to their songwriting roots. Their near-telepathic communication, the pleasure they find in each other’s stupidity – Lennon’s manic humor is full here – and their ability to be vulnerable, open and honest, shown in a secretly recorded conversation between them about Harrison’s legitimate dissatisfaction, share a fully marked heart as warm as any of the band’s earworm tunes.

Photo: Disney Plus

Third section of Come back is the strongest of the trio, by virtue of including the entire famous rooftop concert. This part also crystallizes some other factors in the band’s later breakup: how hard Lennon fell for music publisher Allen Klein, and McCartney’s desire for the band to push the band creatively without a roadmap or plans for a destination. And the crisp beauty of this restoration gets its best show in the rooftop performance, a marked improvement over the 1970 documentary leave it. A magnificent selection of diptych and triptych collages brings together images of the confused but tense audience at street level, the urban neighboring rooftops filled with dizzying spectators and the enlivened band.

Unlike in the previous sections, every detail here feels necessary and huge, fun and revealing. A man on the street interviews listeners ranging from all walks of life. Frivolous cops and cynical businessmen who want to close the show become the easy villains. The four boys and Preston are the clear heroes. Their soulful, last breath in public together, the debut of unheard songs on a city roof, a bold move so shocking that it has never really been repeated with the same gusto, is a clear call that reveals everything that made them special, and showcases the artistic pleasures that still delight to this day.

This eight-hour documentary series, a mix of half-baked compositions and mind-boggling noodles on instruments, desperately needs a discerning eye to cut the fat away. Jackson is not ready for the task. Instead of a robust five-hour cut, the instructor delivers an unshakable marathon that is hard to watch. In fact, it’s reminiscent of a John Milton phrase from watching it the lost paradise: Fit audiences find, though few. For everyone except the most extreme Beatles fanatics, Jacksons Come back lacks haste and storytelling and is too busy just seeing the group in all their mundaneness. For the group’s most dedicated scholar, however, Jacksons Come back is an appropriate, expansive interrogation and celebration of their waning days.

All eight hours The Beatles: Come back now streamed on Disney Plus.