‘Beatles ’64’ movie review: scratching the surface but not the itch
By now, it feels like the world should be asking the question: what more is there to know about The Beatles? They’re the biggest band in music history. Everyone knows their names and songs, and most people have at least a rough understanding of their story. If they don’t, there is a wealth of information out there to teach them.
There are countless films, books, entire websites and many, many documentaries, so with the announcement of Beatles ’64, Disney’s latest look into the group with the help of Martin Scorsese, there’s the inevitable question of what it has to offer. The answer is a specific look at a specific moment, tightening the view onto one landmark tour.
As the documentary begins, it takes a beat before even showing the Fab Four. Instead, a montage of archival footage immediately does a great job of positioning the band against the country’s social and political climate. This was a nation reeling. Beatlemania was a welcome escape.
Right as they’d begun to embrace modernity as countercultural scenes were popping up country-wide, and social justice causes like the fight for racial equality seemed to be on the verge of real, de facto breakthroughs in government, JFK was shot, and with it, a sense of optimism was killed right when it should have been only just beginning. So when The Beatles come to town, the documentary shows the band as a stand-in for hope. The group, who had just teetered over the edge into a whole new level of stardom, the type that the world had never seen before, stepped off the plane in America as a kind of unifying obsession.
The most beautiful moments of the documentary come when they zoom in even further. While already keeping a narrow frame by focusing entirely on the band’s American tour between August 19th and September 20th, 1964, they close in even tighter by making it personal. In addition to talking heads from famous faces and interview clips of the band members, the team behind the documentary tracked down real fans. Clips of Beatlemania are followed by moving first-person commentary from women who spent their teens screaming outside hotel rooms as they attempted to unpack what it all meant to them, or now old fans still beaming as they show off the merch collection they amassed.
It contextualises these moments that we’ve forever been told were historic and iconic, like the band’s appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show, when they then cut to a powerful video of a young girl at home, watching and reacting to the show in real-time. This feels like real value as I can’t think of another Beatles retrospective that manages to tie together future commentary and analysis with real-life footage, proving that these moments aren’t just important in hindsight but were important then, too.
However, it often feels like Beatles ’64 can’t pick a lane. Despite already having a concise focus, the problem is that nothing about the band and their impact is ever concise or simple. Everything they do is now weighted with so much history and so many other considerations and viewpoints that come spider-webbing off that. Even the simplest video clip of the boys messing around backstage seems more than it actually is. This new documentary falls into a habit of attempting to follow them but then having to come back to its base, leading to a result that feels slightly all over the place and too busy while also not having the capacity to fully explore any one thing.
But the points they attempt to tackle are interesting, and all are worthy of more thorough investigations, leaving me to wonder if maybe this even could’ve worked better as a TV show, taking the Peter Jackson approach of refusing to cut down the footage and instead allow it to exist as a more mammoth undertaking.
One of the most interesting moments in the film considers the band’s role in the fight against racism and the debate between them co-opting the music of Black Americans while also being a major force in helping to make ‘Black music’ mainstream and being clear and vocal fans of black artists who fought for a desegregated platform by sharing this love and refusing to play segregated shows. This is a huge topic that feels worthy of more air time than the documentary can afford it.
The same goes for the consideration of the role of fan girls as Smokey Robinson of The Miracles delivers a beautiful line about how “women make the showbiz world go round”. While Beatlemania has been covered to no end, it felt like Beatles ’64 wanted to go deeper into the essential role and the true power that young women had and still have over music, but again, it didn’t have time.
It’s a documentary that’s trying to do it all. There are glimmers of these major topics, sprinkled in with the humanising moments that everyone loves as The Beatles are shown as the four young lads they were, laughing at their own jokes in the paper and messing around. There are also flashes forward and back as those same lads appear in their older years, providing their own analysis of these early, halcyon days.
However, its downfall comes from the fact that all of these things are great and with the ongoing hunger for more and more of The Beatles, they’re all elements that fans want, but at a one-hour 45-minute runtime, Beatles ’64 simultaneously isn’t long enough to fit it all in thoroughly enough, but is also left feeling long and somewhat bloated as it’s busy trying to do it all, making for a watch that scratches the surface of so many interesting points but not the itch.
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