Despite long appearing to be for the latter in the eternal Beatles versus The Stones debate, Martin Scorsese has made an illuminative, if sometimes eccentric, documentary about the member of the Fab Four who most often avoided scrutiny. George Harrison: Living in the Material World shows the guitarist, songwriter and eventually film producer as a famous person who cared little for his status. Scorsese doesn’t attempt to demystify Harrison, who died of lung cancer in November 2001 at the age of 58, but rather examines the musician by the qualities he valued, whether it was honesty in composing or spiritual sustenance.
This is not your standard musical biopic – for a start there’s no Bono. In fact, there are no outsiders or talking heads, and as with his magisterial Bob Dylan: No Direction Home from 2005, Scorsese and editor David Tedeschi cut quickly, sometimes mysteriously, from eyewitness or archival footage, historic anecdote to amateur footage. You sense early on, with a stunning edit from the proto-Beatles as teenage hopefuls to exasperated men signing reams of dissolution documents in a hotel suite, that the film holds together as a sideways view into a dominant moment in popular culture; if this was your life, Scorsese asks, wouldn’t you want to experience God on your own terms?
Harrison, according to Ringo Starr, had two distinct sides: a black and white, sweet and angry division. In a lovely letter home to his mum and dad in Liverpool from an early American tour, where a hint of the band in public unleashed chaos, he genially reports on a day in Los Angeles that begins well with a swim in Burt Lancaster’s pool but ends with Harrison throwing a drink over a lurking photographer. Harrison is the quiet one clocking everything, a step behind Paul McCartney’s good boy and John Lennon’s acerbic iconoclast. He’s late to songwriting, and gets a small quota on The Beatles’ records, which eventually contributes to the divisive tension.
Scorsese’s movie is basically three and a half hours long (it’s safe to say he got final cut) and it comes with an interval that falls in 1968, with the gently searing 'While My Guitar Gently Weeps" closing the first part, before the dissolution of The Beatles and Harrison’s initially prodigious solo output introduces the second half. The musician’s latter decades, when he helped finance Monty Python’s Life of Brian and gardened while keeping a low public profile (John Lennon’s murder left him anxious about stalkers), are not as immediately exciting, but by removing The Beatles the documentary gets at the man Harrison became after the strange weightlessness of the sixties ended.
The standard rap for such projects is that fans won’t be disappointed, but the way that Scorsese approaches Harrison’s life – with dry humour and visual insight, predicated on the subject’s own values – makes George Harrison: Living in the Material World a worthy introduction or a masterclass. The movie doesn’t sanctify Harrison (the writer of 'Taxman' really wasn’t keen on paying tax), but it does bring him to life.
