Martin Scorsese (2011)
I don’t remember much of No Direction Home (2005), Scorsese’s documentary about Bob Dylan, except that it was interesting and enjoyable. So is this new film about George Harrison (which, according to Wikipedia, is exactly the same length as No Direction Home – 208 minutes). The crucial difference for me is an emotional connection with the Beatles that I don’t have with Dylan – good memories not only of their songs and celebrity during their life as a group, in my childhood, but of the accumulation of TV interviews and documentaries with and about them that it’s been great to watch in the decades since. Of course George Harrison’s death from cancer, at the age of fifty-eight, in 2001 wasn’t shocking in the way John Lennon’s assassination had been more than twenty years earlier but, because it resulted from natural causes (and because I always preferred George to John), it was more saddening to me. If Living in the Material World wasn’t up to much I’d probably still feel well disposed to it because of its subject and the music that it’s bound to feature. It’s almost a bonus that Scorsese’s film is a fine piece of work.
George Harrison and Martin Scorsese connote, for me, almost entirely separate eras – yet the film takes its title from an album that Harrison made in the same year that Mean Streets was released. The film screened as a two-part Arena on BBC2; Sally and I watched it in four instalments. I felt particularly up for watching the third hour but that’s only a small part of the explanation of why this part has the greatest impetus. Scorsese not only describes but conveys through the increased dynamism of the film’s rhythm at this point how much George was raring to go as a songwriter and solo artist in the last days of The Beatles and the years that immediately followed. You know it from ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’ from The White Album (1968), from ‘Something’ on Abbey Road (1969), from his solo album All Things Must Pass (1970), with tracks like ‘My Sweet Lord’ and ‘What Is Life?’ I don’t think anything Harrison wrote subsequently comes within a mile of any of these (or that anything from Lennon or McCartney post-1970 stands comparison with Lennon & McCartney in the decade before). The fact that George Harrison is an intriguing and appealing character – more so than either John or Paul – makes the creatively leaner later years much less of a problem than they might otherwise be. Scorsese organises the narrative very skilfully: during much of the first hour it seems to be another film about the Beatles before turning decisively into a biography of George. This too reflects how gradually, at the time, he emerged from behind the stronger public personalities of Paul and John.
The film begins with recollections of George by a good few of the many talking heads we’ll see and hear in the course of what follows. These fragments go on for some time, making you impatient for things really to get going before giving you a sense that Scorsese is acknowledging from the outset the limits of documentary biography: the fact that George meant different things to these people seems to imply his ultimate unknowability. It must be said that some of the most prominent interviewees – Eric Idle, Jackie Stewart, especially Eric Clapton – are not interesting in themselves. But the effect that George Harrison had on them is. His widow Olivia – they were married for more than twenty years – is something else. Her blend of religious conviction and acerbic honesty (when asked ‘What’s the secret of a long marriage?’ she replied ‘Not getting divorced’) chimes with George Harrison’s own personality – which evidently combined convinced spirituality and undying determination to beat the Taxman. When you see Harrison at work in the studio he’s evidently passionate about the music he’s making; when he grins at the camera, he’s clearly amused by it too.
The tensions that developed with Paul McCartney are present in clips from the sixties, in the determined affability of later reunions, and in McCartney’s reminiscences from today. It’s unsurprising but still striking that John Lennon is such a minor character in Living in the Material World. Ringo, who I see I’ve not mentioned until now, is inherently a minor character but his affection for George makes his recounting their last conversation one of the most emotionally powerful moments in the film. Among the other witnesses, Joan Taylor, the widow of the Beatles’ press officer Derek, is incisive, nuanced and very likeable. The most compelling reminiscences are those of Astrid Kirchherr and Klaus Voormann from the Hamburg days. Among the many wonderful still photographs in the film, perhaps the finest is one of George and John, taken by Kirchherr shortly after Stuart Sutcliffe’s death and beautifully described in the interview that she gives here.
19 November 2011
