“George Harrison: Living in the Material World” is Martin Scorsese’s tender examination of the life of the quiet Beatle. It is exhaustive and loopy and it takes two nights to watch — Wednesday and Thursday on HBO.
Early on, Scorsese almost does something that would have been heretically bold but also smooth. There is a photograph of the Beatles together in their earliest days, before the Cavern or Hamburg, when it was just a bunch of adolescents in a skiffle band playing at church picnics. A baby-faced Harrison is among them, barely a teenager. That shot is then quickly followed by a scene where, surrounded by lawyers, Harrison and Paul McCartney jovially sign the paperwork that begins the litigiously endless dissolution of the Beatles.
(Apple Corps Limited/HBO) - George Harrison is the band’s brooding, most spiritually-minded member.
Brilliant, I thought: Scorsese is going to skip the thoroughly documented years between 1959 and 1970; he’ll simply stipulate the facts we all know by heart, the story that began in working-class Liverpool and came to fractious finality on Abbey Road. Why not just bookend the Beatlemania era, which is common cultural memory anyhow? That way, Scorsese (and his viewers) could get down to the business of peeling away the essential mystery of Harrison, the band’s brooding, most spiritual member, who died of cancer in 2001.
But I was wrong. “Living in the Material World” circles around and very much dwells on the Beatles’ heyday for most of its first half, as any of the countless Beatles documentaries and books must.
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