Almost everyone who grew up with the Beatles knows a few important things about their manager, Brian Epsteinthe subject of the new biography”Midas Man.” You may know that he ran a popular record shop in Liverpool when he first saw the Beatles perform at the Cavern Club and realized that it was his destiny to manage them. You almost certainly know that it was Epstein who took over the Beatles’ image, taking four dirty blue-collar rockers in black leather jackets, dressing them in collarless gray suits and giving them the fabled moptop haircuts – the look that sparked a thousand screams. Or the visionary way in which he led the Beatles’ international career by breaking their contract to appear on “The Ed Sullivan Show.” Or the fact that Epstein was gay, something he kept well hidden.
If you’ve ever seen pictures of Brian Epstein, you also know the most resonant and, in a way, the most fascinating thing about him: that he was a straight British gentleman with a stoic gaze and a low-key charm, who spoke in a voice of silk aristocratic polish (the product of years of private schooling). He was as conservative in his businessman demeanor as the Beatles were rebellious and brash.
If you know even a fraction of this, you’ll go into “Midas Man” wanting to see the fairy-tale anecdotes stuffed (which the director, Joe Stephenson, and the screenwriters, Brigit Grant and Jonathan Wakeham, pull off in a rather casual TV- movie mode). And of course you want to see who Brian Epstein really was – the man under the picture, something the film presents in dutiful tabloid detail. Still, there’s something a little casual about that, too. Even the sketchiest ’80s TV biopic was always about the “dark side,” because that’s probably where the drama is.
In “Midas Man,” we get glimpses of Epstein’s secret gay life in Liverpool (picking up men in the middle of the night at isolated cruise sites, at one point engaging a mugger who threatens to blackmail him). And we see how uncomfortable the dawning awareness of his secret side makes his traditional Jewish parents, the adoring Queenie (Emily Watson) and the sternly resentful Harry (Eddie Marsan). Later, when the Beatles are famous and Epstein has moved to London, we see Brian’s liberated but troubled relationship with a ne’er-do-well American actor named Tex (Ed Speleers), and we see his increasing dependence on self-medication: the tumbler of whiskey he always has in hand, his escalating cocktail of amphetamines and barbiturates (so he can go and go…and then sleep). But even if it’s all true, it feels pretty… standard to just present this.
The film’s star, Jacob Fortune-Lloyd, is an appealing actor (best known for his work on “The Queen’s Gambit”) who dramatizes the sharpness of Brian’s intelligence and how his passion for the Beatles was a response to their magic that he converted. into an equation of sorts — about how those girls in the packed audience at the Cavern Club could be elevated to a global scale. He foresaw everything. But I wish Fortune-Lloyd looked more like Brian (he’s taller, darker, and more raw-boned), and that he embodied more of Epstein’s almost painful velvetiness.
“Midas Man” has had a troubled productionwith a revolving door of directors and a special issue you wouldn’t see outside of a modestly budgeted early Beatles biopic. It seems that a number of the film’s investors assumed it would include original Beatles songs – but in fact the producers never got the rights. So the only songs we hear the Beatles perform in the film are covers (“Please Mr. Postman”, “Money”, etc.).
Sorry, but I could have told the investors. In what universe would Apple Corps Ltd. or Sony Music Publishing licensing the use of the Beatles’ music for a small-scale independent production? “Backbeat,” the great early Beatles biopic from 1994, faced the same stumbling block but made artistic hay out of it (which it could because the film was only set in Liverpool and Hamburg). But when “Midas Man” reaches the moment when the Beatles become famous, you feel the absence of their music, as if scenes had been cut.
Finding actors to impersonate the Beatles is almost always a tricky endeavor, but I thought these actors did a reasonable job – Blake Richardson fervently reproducing Paul’s grins and headbutts and cherubic stubbornness, Jonah Lees nailing the vulnerability beneath John’s hostility (even though he too short!—couldn’t they have given him lifts?).
Backstage at the Cavern Club after he first saw them, Brian says, “You were meh-velous”, leading to much mockery of his elegant airs. But his loyalty is real. When it looks like the Beatles can’t find a record label to sign them, he perseveres, and they land an audition at Parlophone, a label that specializes in comedy. There, they must win over the house producer, George Martin, played by Charley Palmer Rothwell, who resembles Martin so much – and so exquisitely mimics his meticulous brilliance and the Mona Lisa’s furtive gaze – that he elevates the film, and in a strange way. way, hurts a little. Rothwell reminds you, for a few minutes, what a biopic looks like when it lives up to the gold standard of authenticity. The rest of “Midas Man”…not so much. (Jay Leno as Ed Sullivan? We get the concept, but it still plays like…huh?)
That said, “Midas Man” is never less than watchable, and it captures something about Brian Epstein that is honest and affecting. His devotion to the Beatles, and to making them more legendary than Elvis, is so consuming that he seems like a man living his dream. But keeping his romantic life in the closet torments him. He has his connections (and doesn’t seem to harbor any guilt about his sexuality), but the intense intolerance of his society makes it nearly impossible for him to be with someone. And so the prison Brian finds himself in is one of spiritual isolation. He has no family of his own and desperately wants one. The Beatles are kind of like family, and so is the nice Cilla Black (Darci Shaw), one of his budding artists. But they cannot fill that void of loneliness. So when John, shocked by the controversy over his-Beatles-is-bigger-than-Jesus comment, tells Brian in 1966 that he wants to stop touring, it’s as if Brian is kicked off the train of his own existence.
“Midas Man” makes us feel for Brian. Still, the film is too sketchy about too much. It shows the outside of his actual London townhouse, but what about his hobbies? His taste in movies? Give us something beyond scenes that have that quality on the nose. In the last part of the film, we needed to see more of how Brian’s relationship with the Beatles developed. “Midas Man” suggests that once the group finished touring, they almost didn’t need Brian anymore; that was not the case.
And ultimately, the film doesn’t veer far enough to the dark side. Brian Epstein died on August 27, 1967 of an accidental drug overdose. He was 32 and sitting on top of the world. Still, he had huge doses of upper and lower parts in his system. This was one of those overdoses that had the absolute reverberation of a slow, unconscious descent into self-destruction. The “Midas Man” should not have settled things by leaving that chapter of his life a mystery. Brian Epstein deserves more than a watchable, useful, in too many ways run-down biopic. Let’s hope that one day (perhaps in Sam Mendes’ upcoming Beatles movies?) his behind-the-scenes genius, and highly civilized joy and torment, will be given their due.
