Peter Jackson should take the Beatles’ advice and Let It Be
If Peter Jackson has a weakness, it’s that he can’t walk away from a task he has already accomplished (mostly) to perfection. Following the triumph of Lord of the Rings, he could have said his farewells to Middle Earth. Instead, he returned for those dreadful Hobbit movies.
Now, in the wake of The Beatles: Get Back, his sprawling 2021 portrait of John, Paul, Ringo and George on the brink of breaking up, he has once again come back for seconds with a restored version of Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s 1970 Fab Four documentary, Let It Be.
It’s a perfectly adequate remastering of a movie that has been unavailable to watch for the past 50 years. But for anyone who has ploughed through all eight hours of Get Back, there is the unmistakable sense of having seen it all before. And with good reason: that three-part mini-series was essentially a director’s cut of Let It Be, utilising more than 60 hours of behind-the-scenes footage shot by Lindsay-Hogg.
Technically, Jackson has done an impressive job in sprucing up the picture. The images are crisp and capture The Beatles when they were still youthful and ready to take on the world. It is striking to watch a young John and Yoko dancing or to see Sir Paul McCartney, now in his 80s, as a twinkle-eyed 27-year-old with a Captain Birdseye beard. The evergreen magic of Beatles songs such as “Don’t Let Me Down” contrasts with the spectacular shabbiness of 1960s London: a blur of pollution-stained buildings and grey men in dark overcoats jump from the screen.
The Beatles playing on the roof of their record label, Apple, in 1969 (Photo: Ethan A Russell/2024 Apple Corps Ltd)
Yet for all of Jackson’s skilled restoration work, there’s no getting around the fact that Let It Be is flawed from the outset. There’s a severe lack of focus and the film meanders like the prog rock that was becoming popular when it was filmed in 1969.
Not every documentary needs to take the viewer by the hand or spell out its themes, but Let It Be goes too far the other way and is often disjointed. Get Back went out of its way to explain what was happening as The Beatles gathered at the studio and began their rehearsals by adding new text to the footage. By contrast, Let It Be leaves it entirely up to the audience to make sense of the material. It feels anchorless, rambling, and almost impossible to follow.
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The best scenes are still riveting; that famous rooftop concert at Apple headquarters is quite rightly part of rock ‘n’ roll folklore. There is also a sweet new introductory conversation between Jackson and Lindsay-Hogg, with the latter expressing the hope Jackson’s remastered version would give the film “a new life in the sunshine”.
“The Beatles that we’d grown up with were not the Beatles in Let It Be,” he says. “They were changing.”
Jackson’s devotion to The Beatles is admirable. He clings to the band’s mythos – now receding from living memory – the way elves in his Lord of the Rings movies clung to their old stories of the world before Sauron. But not for the first time, the director’s enthusiasm has arguably got the better of him. It’s nowhere near as dreadful as The Hobbit trilogy, but his newly restored Get Back still feel surplus to requirements.
Jackson really should have taken the advice of McCartney’s eponymous song and let it be.
Let It Be is streaming on Disney+.