Well, sort of. Really, only kinda. This is less the story of the biggest entertainment act in history than their manager. How good can that be? Well, Brian Epstein is not just a guy who struck it lucky with a choice, his short life and career has enough tough stuff to warrant a compelling narrative. Pity they left most of that out, here.
I'm going to go against my own grain in this review and hold some other works up for comparison. This is not just to say this is good and that's bad nor the mediocrity's way out which is to labour a similarity as though it's more than a shared detail.
First, Backbeat. This is one of the most accurate studies of any young band, let alone a pre-fame Beatles; it shows the conflicts and bonds that play so gravely in young adults. Second, Nowhere Boy. Young John Lennon and friends form a band whose eventual name is never mentioned, concentrating on a trauma from Lennon's childhood. Third, the graphic novel The Fifth Beatle which is about Epstein and depicts a young business man making hasty decisions, having a dangerous sex life and growing alienated from his most famous clients as they drift into the stratosphere of invention.
What we get here is a pageant of great moments in history, told with knuckle-dragging reverence here and soap opera intimacy there. A few scenes that depict stolen trysts of opportunity hold promise of more to come with the sense that they will develop throughout the tale as Epstein's fortunes rise. Instead, they disappear and dissolve into a longer term relationship that ends in betrayal that is neither punished nor strongly exposed for the social ill that might prevent retribution. Brian Epstein was gay when that was illegal in the U.K. He was still alive when the Sexual Offences Act 1967 was passed. Before then, being who you were could get you a jail sentence. The law lifted fear from millions of people but it doesn't rate a mention.
And that's the story with everything else. According to this, Brian Epstein coursed through his life pushing confrontations down like lumps in the gravy. When he must sack drummer Pete Best, the scene has so very little of the operatic turmoil that a young adult being rejected would have expressed. Extortion threats just get dropped by the story, the dread that Epstein surely felt when the band decided against any more touring in 1966, and so much more that might have help build an interesting story get ironed out into a kind of caramel smoothie.
Michael Winterbottom's 24 Hour Party People told the career of Tony Wilson, mixing cheeky to-camera asides with scenes that rolled like the best after dinner stories. Steve Coogan declares that he, as Wilson, is a minor character in his own biography. Aside from some well staged monologues about things like the U.S. tours that have Epstein telling us what they involved as he walks toward us against a moving projected backdrop is the right idea but there is so little flavour to it that it passes into the rest of the caramel like everything else. By the time he is confronted with his own mortality it is far too late for anyone in the audience to feel much.
What's good? The casting of The Beatles works well. They look, sound and move like the band they're meant to be and whenever we see them in a scene we want the film to switch and say, "just kidding, this is the story of The Fab Four."
The fault is in the writing. It feels as though everything that might have been too daring in the life story of a man who packed up his conflicts until they outweighed him, has been diluted or discarded. Why? Are Beatles fans now really going to be offended or hurt in some way if something more like Brian Epstein's life were to be told in fiction? As it is we cannot get close to the story because it resists its own audience with its blandness. Last comparison: The Hours and Times is a tough little film that speculates on what happened when Epstein took John Lennon to Spain on a holiday at the onset of Beatlemania. It states clearly at the outset that it is making it all up but when it does get into what moments of intimacy and questions of fame, it delivers. For all its creaky old indy look, it breaks through. Midas Man is more like the previously-on sequence of a mini-series that never quite starts before the end credits.
Midas Man is currently on general release.
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