Author: Urban Bolta
Artist: Harrison, George
Label: Universal Music Group
Release: 2011
Running time: 208 minutes
Rating: 4/5
Exactly a decade after the death of »the quiet Beatle« George Harrison, the documentary Living in the Material World came out, the work of director Martin Scorsese. The eminent director has been involved in quite a few high-profile music projects in recent years: besides Harrison, Scorsese has also gone deep on the Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan through his films. And Dylan is exactly who George Harrison had a lot in common with. Not only were they longtime friends and collaborators on numerous projects (the Concert for Bangladesh, membership in the supergroup The Travelling Wilburys…), but both of them, through imaginative and sometimes downright baffling lyrics, passed on to their audiences a life philosophy that seems strange to the average mortal. Still, the two documentaries can’t really be compared: in Dylan’s »No Direction Home« the director focused solely on the early career of the American singer-songwriter, while »Living in the Material World« covers George Harrison’s entire life path.
The title of the documentary is borrowed from Harrison’s 1973 album and its title track. George Harrison tasted worldwide fame very early. By the time he was twenty, the Beatles had released their debut, and a few years later he had enough money to last several generations. But that didn’t mean much to him. He always loved chasing new challenges, and over the course of the sixties he changed more in his thinking than any of the other three Beatles, throwing himself completely into Hindu thought and meditation. He began weaving his newfound insights into his lyrics with great finesse, using them to pass on ideas he’d picked up while hanging out with great Indian thinkers. The title of the documentary thus sums up Harrison’s life all by itself: he was well provided for, yet he never stopped realizing, and telling the world through his music, that it’s the state of mind that makes a person truly happy in the long run.
In this biographical stroll of more than three hours, Scorsese devoted fully half of the running time to the Beatles era. Since mountains of material have already been written and filmed about the most important band of all time, the director had to find an original angle to tackle the subject in an interesting way, and for the most part he pulled it off. Instead of showing the Beatlemania years with the standard footage of crowds going wild, he uses the plain text of a postcard Harrison wrote to his family around 1964, read in the film by his son Dhani. The whole Beatles story is told through Harrison’s eyes: how George joined the band as a youngster and John Lennon didn’t even want to take him on at first because of his age, through the years when he was slowly growing as a songwriter, all the way to the second half of the sixties, when he had a creative revelation but the Lennon / McCartney duo jealously guarded their turf. One of the most interesting clips in the film comes from Abbey Road studio during the recording of the Beatles’ album of the same name, when George and Paul got into a spat.
The second half of the film is devoted to the next thirty years of Harrison’s life: his solo career, his friendship with Eric Clapton, his film career with the crew of the legendary British comedy troupe Monty Python, the supergroup The Travelling Wilburys and all the other major milestones of his life. Unlike quite a few similar music documentaries, the director also pieces together Harrison’s private life bit by bit. His brothers appear as interviewees right at the start, while his parents aren’t mentioned until his mother’s death, even though she was a big supporter of her son’s musical path (at least in the early days) and an important part of the Beatles story. In the film George says: »We have to do something with our lives, and that’s something I definitely know how to do«. Beyond music, Harrison also explored other spheres of society in his later years, so it’s no surprise he found friends everywhere; in the film even former Formula One star Jackie Stewart pays him tribute.
Because the film skips quickly from one major chronological event to the next without a central narrative thread, it can be rather exhausting to follow for someone not already familiar with Harrison’s life. The director spent a huge amount of time on certain events that were essential for understanding his life, such as his subordinate position within the Beatles or his discovery of Indian transcendental meditation, so you also have to accept the long overall runtime. On the other hand, the two-hundred-minute documentary is all the sweeter for anyone who follows the Beatles more closely and in the wider context of their significance, since Scorsese, with the help of widow Olivia Harrison, dug up plenty of previously unseen footage from George’s personal archive and enriched it with numerous comments from guests in music, film and other walks of life who were connected to Harrison’s life in some way. After all, it was also George’s wish that any film made in his memory be put together from documents in his archive: video footage, photographs, letters, postcards…
The ending, too, shows George Harrison as a great man with his heart in the right place, whose sense of humor never abandoned him even in life’s toughest trials. Ringo Starr recalls visiting the Swiss hospital where George lay before his death with tears in his eyes. According to him, even on his deathbed George was still smiling and full of lust for life. As a man who followed a positive spirit all along, he wasn’t the least bit afraid of death. Harrison’s life was a colorful musical and philosophical journey, and so is Scorsese’s biographical film »Living in the Material World«. Highly recommended viewing for all music lovers, and practically mandatory for those whose hearts beat faster when listening to the Beatles.
Production
Martin Scorsese
