A version of this review appeared in The Age, October 15, 2011.
Eric Clapton says that hanging out with his Beatle mate George Harrison at the height of the 1960s was like being with King Arthur at Camelot – which is hardly an exaggerated comparison. Long ago, the Beatles passed into myth: the story of their rise to fame and eventual break-up will continue to be told and retold, from every possible point of view.
Martin Scorsese's three-and-a-half-hour documentary centres on the enigmatic Harrison and his many adventures – from his adolescence in Liverpool to his search for truth in India to his significant later career as a film producer, starting with Monty Python's Life Of Brian (1979). Scorsese doesn't bother for long with second-hand testimony from critics or historians; the emphasis is on Harrison's personality as recalled by those who knew him best, including his surviving bandmates and both his wives.
The film fits easily into Scorsese's body of work, as a study of a complex, sometimes angry figure struggling with his contradictions. Harrison was as hedonistic as the next pop star, but nobody seems to doubt the depth of his spiritual commitment, nor the capacity for humility and tenderness which is expressed in his best-known songs (“Here Comes the Sun,” for example, or “My Sweet Lord”). Overall, it's an admiring portrait, but one that acknowledges the less appealing side of Harrison's determination to do things his own way: it's intriguing that the man who organised the first rock benefit concert – for Bangladesh in 1971 – kept plotting to avoid the taxman right up till his death.
Martin Scorsese's three-and-a-half-hour documentary centres on the enigmatic Harrison and his many adventures – from his adolescence in Liverpool to his search for truth in India to his significant later career as a film producer, starting with Monty Python's Life Of Brian (1979). Scorsese doesn't bother for long with second-hand testimony from critics or historians; the emphasis is on Harrison's personality as recalled by those who knew him best, including his surviving bandmates and both his wives.
The film fits easily into Scorsese's body of work, as a study of a complex, sometimes angry figure struggling with his contradictions. Harrison was as hedonistic as the next pop star, but nobody seems to doubt the depth of his spiritual commitment, nor the capacity for humility and tenderness which is expressed in his best-known songs (“Here Comes the Sun,” for example, or “My Sweet Lord”). Overall, it's an admiring portrait, but one that acknowledges the less appealing side of Harrison's determination to do things his own way: it's intriguing that the man who organised the first rock benefit concert – for Bangladesh in 1971 – kept plotting to avoid the taxman right up till his death.
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