Are there actually millennials who are unaware of The Beatles, Beatlemania and their influence on popular culture in the 20th Century? Almost no other band in rock history has endured and maintained their popularity and legacy across generations quite like The Beatles. And yet despite being some of the most documented individuals of all time, there’s somehow still a need for yet another Beatles documentary complete with more “never before seen footage,” as if any could possibly exist.
Ron Howard’s “Eight Days a Week – The Touring Years” captures the mayhem of Beatlemania and the energy of John, Paul, George and Ringo on and off stage, but it fails to delve into even basic observations about what makes their music special. It has impeccably remastered live footage, much of it derived from bootleg home video, but it’s a superficially glossy appreciation of the band that will amuse longtime fans and perhaps register with young newcomers and skeptics.
“Eight Days a Week” builds a story out of The Beatles’ touring between 1962 to 1966, showing how they went from the best of brothers, a four-headed monster on stage and off, to showing how they become disillusioned with touring and performing live, how their last few shows of being unable to hear themselves and being escorted out in meat locker trucks, had lost its mystique.
Some of The Beatles’ live performances in question come from shows at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles, from Shea Stadium, from Budokan in Japan and even briefly in the Cavern Club in Liverpool, among others. It’s a great concert doc in the sense that the songs sound crisp, the colors are luscious, and you’d never assume that the filmmakers pieced together home movie footage from fans and from archives in order to achieve the look. Let’s put it this way: all together, it’s far better than anything you’ll find on YouTube.
But why not stop and ask some of those fans who contributed their videos their particular memories? How did The Beatles change the lives of these ordinary individuals who were lucky enough to be there? Howard instead oddly interviews both Whoopi Goldberg and Sigourney Weaver about their concert experiences. Their testimonies are not particularly profound revelations about the band’s wide reaching influence, and one wonders why Howard didn’t think to spend more time with Malcolm Gladwell, who has an innate understanding of their cultural standing, or Elvis Costello, who offers perhaps the only piece of real music criticism in the film.
Costello explains how the radical shift from singing “Love Me Do” to “Tomorrow Never Knows” took the world for a whirl, that the more you sat with these strange, experimental pop songs, you grew away from the teeny-bopper sound into something more mature. The movie stops short at the other observation that these are songs that were made for the studio and could hardly be performed live.
Time and again you get the sense that they’ve shorted the actual music. One composer who surely has more to say about their quality is reduced to a sound bite in which he equates excellence with sheer quantity, that they produced as many above average songs as Mozart in their few years as a band. Then you have British comic Eddie Izzard analyzing their comedic charm, something obvious to anyone who can just watch Ringo impersonate Elvis or Paul and George dumping cigarette ashes into John’s hair during an interview.
You would think a movie with the subtitle “The Touring Years” might have a sequel in store called “The Later Years,” but Howard completely glosses over everything that happened between 1967 and 1970. So no India excursion, no Magical Mystery Tour, no band conflict, no change of heart from confused teenage girls on American Bandstand, and no Yoko, who was a large contributor in terms of footage.
“The Beatles were the show and the music had nothing to do with it,” says John when asked about why they decided to stop touring. I couldn’t have said it better myself.
2 ½ stars