If you told me that there was a plan in the works to make four Beatles biopics – one each about John, Paul, George and Ringo – and that they would be directed by Richard Linklater, I would be filled with curiosity and excitement. If you told me that those same four films would be directed by Martin Scorsese, I would be filled with curiosity and excitement. If you told me that a quartet of Beatles biopics would be directed (one each) by Linklater, Scorsese, Greta Gerwig, and Todd Haynes, I would be filled with curiosity and excitement—and, in fact, that last choice would make a beautiful kind of sense. (I say offhandedly that Linklater should play Paul, Haynes should play John, Scorsese should play George, and Gerwig should play Ringo.) When you think about it, why would anyone—even Scorsese, a dramatic poet? Operatic Rock – Want to channel all four Beatles’ biographies? Talk about reaping the spoils.
But Sam Mendes does. According to the master plan that was delivered on stone tablets by… I’m not sure who, but the plan is in place, there will actually be a quartet of Beatles biopics, and all four will be produced by the director of “American Beauty,” “Road to Perdition.” “Revolutionary Road,” “1917,” “Empire of Light” and many other films that I’m not the only one who’s not crazy about. I’m not out to get rid of Mendes. He’s without a doubt a talented director. “American Beauty” is amazingly crafted (Although I thought his script was weak.) Although I am in a very small minority I am not a huge fan of Skyfall, the first of Mendes’ two Bond films (almost no one likes Specter, its sequel ), I realize it’s a cult film entering the 007 canon.
Mendes is skilled with actors, and there’s no denying that he has good skills. However, I would argue that in the 24 years since he won an Oscar for American Beauty, he has not fulfilled the promise he made to himself on that awards night. There’s something earnest, corny, and very thematically self-aware about Mendes’ filmmaking. He knows how to put things in order, but he falls into excessive slavery to second-rate ideas. To me, he simply hasn’t created a track record that says: This is the director you want to hand the Beatles story to. Every eight to 10 hours of it.
Consider the following scenario. Sam Mendes released his first Beatles movie, and no one cares much about it. Are we then stuck, irrevocably, with three more Beatles Mendes films? Who gave him the keys to the Fab Four Kingdom anyway? Didn’t Sam Mendes learn to share as a kid?
The Beatles, whether captured individually or as a group, would seem to be the very difficult subject of a biopic, since their story is shrouded in myth. However, the truth is that there have been many very good Beatles biographies. Intrepid independent director Christopher Monk got the ball rolling in 1991 with The Hours and Times, an hour-long speculative drama of what might have happened during the holiday trip to Spain of John Lennon and Brian Epstein, the Beatles’ manager. Together in 1963. It is known that Epstein was attracted to John, and the film was about gay people. But mostly it was about portraying a Beatle with unusual intimacy, and Ian Harte’s performance as Lennon was a revelation.
Hart was cast to play John again in “Backbeat,” a 1994 Ian Softley-directed drama that depicted the Beatles’ time in Hamburg before they became famous. It is one of the most original music biographies ever written. Although not of that caliber, she was drawn to Nowhere Boy (2009), an early Lennon biopic directed by Sam Taylor-Johnson (and the one in which she met her husband, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, who played the teenage John). It’s a film that understands, from the inside out, Lennon’s formative relationships with his mother, Julia, and his Aunt Mimi, who raised him. It is no coincidence that all three of these films deal with the Beatles before The Beatles debut. They were just people back then; They were not yet bigger than Jesus. But how do you portray the life of the Beatles when they became larger than life?
This is a daunting challenge, and one that I imagine any filmmaker alive would be intimidated by. This is one of the reasons I think splitting the four Beatles biographies between four different directors makes sense. But what The Mendes Project tells you is that Sam Mendes already had his overall vision for the Beatles story. And while we of course shouldn’t judge a film before it’s made, I don’t think I’m being reckless or unfair when I say that now, I don’t trust Sam Mendes to have a deep insight into the Beatles. Enough to be worthy of the Beatles. I fear that Mendes, in signing up to make these four films, appears to have devised a way to turn the life and music of the Beatles into a major form of intellectual property.
Here is a question that is far from irrelevant. In 25 years of filmmaking, Mendes has done just that never Did you use a noticeable needle drop? It’s not like I want to see a Beatles story put together by a music video artist. But directors like Scorsese and Linklater used pop music with the expression of action artists. I think with Mendes you can say: There’s always a first time. But is this, as a culture, what we really want to say?