Dir: Joe Stephenson | Cast: Jacob Fortune-Lloyd, Ed Speleers, Eddie Izzard, Jay Leno, Eddie Marsan, Emily Watson | UK Drama 112′
When Beatles manager Brian Epstein died in August 1967, at the height of the Summer of Love, the band went into meltdown. “We collapsed,” John Lennon recalled. “I knew that we were in trouble then. I didn’t really have any misconceptions about our ability to do anything other than play music, and I was scared.”
Epstein’s unwavering belief drove the Beatles to fame. He moulded their early image and helped them negotiate the initial phases of their monumental success. Then he was gone, leaving the stricken band to limp on, demoralised and disintegrating, for three more years.
Was his early death an avoidable accident? Were his demons poised to drag him to hell, no matter how grand his achievements? Or was he collateral damage of the Beatles’ meteoric rise? It isn’t entirely clear whether Midas Man has an answer to this, although it seems to err towards the second option.
But this leaves out the psychic maelstrom of the Sixties. No one could have foreseen how the decade would unfold, and nothing could have prepared a man, whose business experience lay in running the music department of his family’s department store, to deal with these pressures. Who’d have thought a Liverpool rock ‘n’ roll group would have the power to rewire global culture – seemingly almost overnight? Certainly not Epstein, not even when he was sitting in the offices of HMV, Pye and Philips, trying to impress the special qualities of his boys on sceptical record company executives.
The Sixties are far away now, and its events seem fixed and immutable. So it’s easy to forget the wild flux of the time, and how rapidly things were moving. Not everyone could keep up: certainly not Billy J. Kramer, Gerry and the Pacemakers, and some of Epstein’s other charges. But the Fab Four rode the wave with astonishing élan, graduating from cheerful teen anthems like ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ to the avant-garde mash-up of ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ in three short years.
Epstein had instituted the matching suits, the unison bowing, and the haircuts which, though long by the standards of the day, always looked combed and clean. All this gave the Beatles’ early presentation a showbiz neatness, but more importantly it fed a public sense of ‘the group’ as shared identity, a unified collective aligned towards some common goal. Within a couple of years, though, these early trappings looked fussy and old-fashioned. History had rolled on.
Jacob Fortune-Lloyd’s Epstein is tall, rangy, chiselled, and tormented. Organised and decisive in his business dealings, he’s shown as passive and masochistic in an emotional life mostly comprised of joyless fumblings with strangers in dark, sordid places. While pursuing the al fresco gay sex which leaves him vulnerable to assault and robbery, Epstein yearns for the settled joys of home and family: an irreconcilable combination which can surely end only in tears.
And there’s worse in store. In New York, Epstein meets struggling actor John ‘Tex’ Ellington, who seems to offer some prospect of meaningful connection. Tex arrives in London, moves into Epstein’s grandiose hotel suite – and disappears with a briefcase containing £20,000. The chaos of Epstein’s personal life has finally erupted into the disciplined world of his career; the cycle of shame and humiliation is complete. Unsurprisingly, he has a breakdown. It’s inferred that his energies are henceforward increasingly sublimated into his work, although the film doesn’t delve into the rumoured sexual dimensions of Epstein’s dealings with the band.
But the question remains – how to get the terminal velocity of the Sixties on screen? Midas Man covers a time of great experiment in film – the Pop Art deconstruction of Jean-Luc Godard, the kinetic energy of ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ – but it stays mostly within the cinematic conventions of the standard biopic. When it moves into more inventive territory, we see what might have been.
In the sequences recounting the band’s U.S. and international tours, the screen is divided into three sections. The middle segment has Epstein walking towards the camera but never getting any closer, all the while accepting pills and drinks from unseen hands. Collaged photos limn a whirl of impressions. The effect is bold, graphic, dreamlike, and a clever encapsulation of the risky hamster wheel Epstein is walking. The film comes alive in these moments.
Like Back to Black a few months ago, Midas Man sets out to celebrate its protagonist’s life, and like the earlier film it spares us Epstein’s sad, possibly self-inflicted end. Instead, it concludes with the studio recording of ‘All You Need is Love’, broadcast to 25 countries and over 400 million people two months before Epstein’s death. This is presented as a personal apotheosis, although it was a technical achievement (the first-ever live global TV link) rather than an emotional milestone.
After this, the circumstances of Epstein’s death are conveyed in a brief onscreen text. But I think it was a mistake to cut the narrative at this point. If we’d been given a sense of the grief and confusion following Epstein’s death we might have truly felt his loss, and perhaps grasped how genuinely precious the Midas Man had become. @IanLong
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