Peter Jackson’s eight-hour Disney Plus documentary The Beatles: Back, an expanded behind-the-scenes documentation of the recording of let it be, depicts a particular scene that anticipates the breakup of the Beatles. It’s January 1969 and the group is desperately trying to flesh out their new song “Two of Us”. You are under immense pressure. For this project they have made it their task to write and arrange 14 new songs in two weeks, which will be recorded live for a studio audience. Cameras are there to capture their efforts. They also record John Lennon and Paul McCartney, who ally themselves against poor George Harrison and squeeze out every sound space for his guitar. Harrison leaves the band and endangers the future of the Inchoate album.
The Beatles – Lennon, McCartney, Harrison, and Ringo Starr – originally hoped for the aptly titled project come back would bring the band back to their roots. They left overdubs or studio tracks and returned to the studio that produced their most famous albums, rather than a mere approach. These recording sessions have long been known as a miserable time for the band.
But Jackson studied 60 hours of 16mm footage shot by filmmaker Michael Lindsay-Hogg and 150 hours of audio to reveal a different reality. While anger and despair color every other minute, so do joy, laughter, and camaraderie. Unfortunately, these nuggets, which recontextualize the Beatles’ lore, are not easy to translate for Jackson.
come back begins with a crunchy, arbitrarily produced montage of the Beatles hits, mixed with excerpts from their career touchstones – their fateful meeting, the beginning of the rough Beatlemania, their debut The Ed Sullivan Show, the backlash against Lennon’s quote “greater than Jesus”. Jackson’s brief, in-depth look at the band’s early career is the only olive branch it will offer casual or newer Beatles fans. The rest of the eight hours of the docuseries are devoted to hardcore – the kind of viewer who can see every part of a studio outtake, every non-album track, and every song the group covered during their time together.
come back records the meetings that led to the worst studio performances of the band’s late career climax, let it be. Jackson reveals the band’s dynamics, introducing the main cast and the sharks circling the water, leading to the downfall of the Beatles. It closes with a testimony to their genius: the roof concert in 1969, which was their last concert as an official band. But Jacksons come back is a grueling endurance test that tends to be repeated. Its fleeting rhapsodies of song creation overflow with magic, but it still wasn’t designed to attract new fans to the Beatles’ music.
The first segment in the series is the most misshapen. It’s a tedious 157 minutes, best left to play in the background while shuffling around the house. This is where the Beatles spend a lot of their time noodling around on their instruments and playing countless covers like “Johnny B. Goode”, “Quinn the Eskimo”, “I Shall Be Released” and so on. But what is beguiling at first come back is his unlikely setting. Instead of opting for a posh recording studio or at least a little closer to Abbey Road, the Beatles opted for the drab, draughty film soundstage at Twickenham Studios. The band temporarily received the space reserved for the filming of the dark comedy The magical Christian (with Peter Sellers and Ringo Starr), by the film producer Denis O’Dell.
It’s almost weird to see the biggest band in the world made so small: their simple setup barely takes up a corner of the studio, they have no recording device and the acoustics of the room are terrible. They rummage through their incomplete melodies, first jokingly, then frustrated.
Although the band meanders, the specter of time limits hangs over the action. Not only have the band not yet written and arranged their songs, they haven’t even decided on a location for their TV special. (You step around at the Sabratha Amphitheater in Libya as an option). Like the group, Jackson is reluctant to push the action. The director renounces any hint of a critical eye. Instead, he unfolds every minute detail from her time in Twickenham, edited by Jabez Olssen (The Hobbit Trilogy). Everything happens almost in real time, regardless of observability.
Too often, Jackson relies on the sights and sounds of song creation to keep audiences investing. It’s exciting when well-known half-finished tracks like “I’ve Got a Feeling”, “Two of Us” and “Get Back” arrive, presented by McCartney Harrison and Starr on bass. These songs are on the edge of the recognizable, but not yet the polished versions that are so at home in the ears of the listener. Listening to tracks like “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” that came on later Abteistrasse
The best bags of the first episode, apart from the Songcraft, always arrive when the band’s fragile dynamics are tested or illuminated. The Beatles’ longtime producer George Martin – who was always the adult in the room but was sidelined in favor of Glyn Johns in the process – describes exactly what plagues the group: Lennon and McCartney are always a team, while Harrison is mostly alone. Jackson doesn’t use this tense reality as a passage. It just rocks on the surface, like a lifebuoy drifting away from a sinking man.
come back gains importance in the second three-hour segment. The band leaves Twickenham Studios for the safe environment of their London headquarters. The all-round sociable keyboard player of the extra class Billy Preston jumps on the sessions and rounds off the substitute sound of the group. Her wives appear: Yoko Ono, Linda McCartney, Pattie Harrison and Maureen Starkey. The group will be energized with new energy. While pressure from the press to cover each of their disagreements and competing business interests begins to crack, the playful footage suggests that the mythology of the band that was offended during these sessions is being overstated.
come back often works best as a love story. Lennon and McCartney once lived in each other’s pockets, but they have grown apart. Both hope this project will heal the wound between them by bringing them back to their songwriting roots. Their almost telepathic communication, the joy they find in each other’s silliness – Lennon’s manic sense of humor comes into play here – and their ability to be vulnerable, open, and honest is revealed in a secretly recorded conversation between them Harrison’s justified resentment gives the second part a full heart, which is as warm as any catchy tune in the band.
The third section of come back is the strongest of the trio as it encompasses the entirety of the famous rooftop gig. That part also crystallizes out several other factors in the band’s eventual breakup: how hard Lennon got into music publishing scammer Allen Klein, and McCartney’s desire for the band to get the band creative without a roadmap or plans for a goal. And the crisp beauty of this restoration is best shown off in the rooftop performance, a marked improvement over the 1970 documentary let it be. A beautiful series of diptych and triptych collages gathers images of the confused but excited crowd in the street, the city rooftops full of dizzying spectators, and the busy band.
Unlike the previous parts, every detail here feels necessary and immense, fun and revealing. A man on the street interviews listeners from all walks of life. Unimpressed cops and cynical business people who want to quit the show become simple villains. The four boys and Preston are the clear heroes. Her soulful, final breaths in public, the debut of unheard songs on a city rooftop, a bold move so shocking that it has never actually been repeated with the same enthusiasm, is a call that reveals everything that made her special and display the artistic joys that continue to give pleasure to this day.
This eight-hour documentary series, a mishmash of half-started compositions and numbing rolling pins on instruments, urgently needs a keen eye to cut away the fat. Jackson is not up to the task. Instead of a robust five-hour cut, the director delivers a relentless, hard-to-watch marathon. In fact, looking at it is reminiscent of a sentence by John Milton Paradise lost: Find a suitable audience, even if only a few. For everyone but the most extreme Beatles fanatics, Jacksons come back lacks urgency and storytelling and is too eager to just observe the group in all its everyday life. For the group’s most dedicated scholars, Jacksons is come back is a fitting, comprehensive survey and celebration of their dwindling days.
Every eight hours The Beatles: Back now streaming on Disney Plus.