Almost anyone who grew up with the Beatles knows a few key things about their manager, Brian Epstein, the subject of the new biopic “Midas Man.” You might know that he ran a popular record store 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 surely know that it was Epstein who made over the Beatles’ image, taking four scruffy working-class rockers in black leather jackets, dressing them in collarless gray suits and giving them those fabled moptop haircuts — the look that launched a thousand screams. Or the visionary way he spearheaded the Beatles’ international career, cutting the deal for them to appear on “The Ed Sullivan Show.” Or the fact that Epstein was gay, something he kept well-hidden.
If you’ve ever seen footage of Brian Epstein, you also know the most resonant and, in a way, the most fascinating thing about him: that he was a straightarrow British gentleman with a rock-steady gaze and a low-key charm, who spoke in a voice of silken aristocratic polish (the product of years of private school). He was as conservative in his businessman’s demeanor as the Beatles were rebellious and cheeky.
If you know even some of this, you go into “Midas Man” wanting to see the fabled anecdotes filled in (which the director, Joe Stephenson, and the screenwriters, Brigit Grant and Jonathan Wakeham, bring off in a rather perfunctory TV-movie fashion). And, of course, you want to see who Brian Epstein really was — the man beneath the image, something the film presents in dutiful tabloid detail. Yet there’s something a bit TV-movie perfunctory about that as well. Even the sketchiest made-for-television biopic of the ’80s was always about the “dark side,” since that, supposedly, is 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 cruising spots, 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 problematic relationship with a ne’er-do-well American actor named Tex (Ed Speleers), and we see his increasing dependence on self-medicating: the tumbler of whiskey he’s always got in hand, his escalating cocktail of amphetamines and barbiturates (so that he can go go go…and then sleep). But even though it’s all true, simply presenting this stuff feels quite…standard.
The film’s star, Jacob Fortune-Lloyd, is an appealing actor (best known for his work on “The Queen’s Gambit”) who dramatizes the crispness of Brian’s intelligence, and how his passion for the Beatles was a response to their magic that he converted into a kind of equation — about how those girls in the packed crowd at the Cavern Club could be leveled up to global scale. He foresaw it all. But I wish Fortune-Lloyd looked more like Brian (he’s taller, darker, and more raw-boned), and that he signified more of Epstein’s almost painful velvet politesse.
“Midas Man” has had a troubled production, with a revolving door of directors and a special problem you wouldn’t see outside of a modestly budgeted early-Beatles biopic. It seems that a number of the film’s investors assumed that it would include original Beatles songs — but, in fact, the producers never landed 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 that. In what universe would Apple Corps Ltd. or Sony Music Publishing license the use of the Beatles’ music for a small-scale independent production? “Backbeat,” the superb early Beatles biopic from 1994, faced the same stumbling block but made artistic hay out of it (which it could do because the film took place only in Liverpool and Hamburg). But by the time “Midas Man” reaches the moment when the Beatles get famous, you feel the absence of their music, as if scenes had been cut out.
Finding actors to impersonate the Beatles is almost always a cringe endeavor, but I thought these actors did a reasonable job — Blake Richardson avidly reproducing Paul’s grins and head cocks and cherubic stubbornness, Jonah Lees nailing the vulnerability under John’s hostility (though he’s too short! — couldn’t they have given him lifts?).
Backstage at the Cavern Club after he first sees them, Brian says, “You were mah-velous,” which leads to much mockery of his classy airs. But his loyalty is real. When it looks like the Beatles can’t find a record company to sign them, he perseveres, and they land an audition at Parlophone, a label that specializes in comedy. There, they have to win over the house producer, George Martin, played by Charley Palmer Rothwell, who looks so much like Martin — and so exquisitely mimics his meticulous brilliance and Mona Lisa scowl — that he lifts the movie up and, in a strange way, hurts it a bit. Rothwell reminds you, for a few minutes, what a biopic looks like when it’s living 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 does capture something about Brian Epstein that’s honest and affecting. His devotion to the Beatles, and to the business of making them more legendary than Elvis, is so consuming that he seems a man who’s living his dream. Yet keeping his romantic life in the closet torments him. He has his hookups (and doesn’t appear to harbor guilt about his sexuality), but the intense intolerance of his society means that it’s almost impossible for him to fully be with someone. And so the prison Brian finds himself in is one of spiritual isolation. He has no family of his own, and wants one desperately. The Beatles are kind of like family, and so is the winsome Cilla Black (Darci Shaw), one of his growing roster of artists. But they can’t fill that void of loneliness. So when John, shell-shocked by the controversy over his the-Beatles-are-bigger-than-Jesus remark, tells Brian in 1966 that he wants to stop touring, it’s as if Brian is getting kicked off the train of his own existence.
“Midas Man” makes us feel for Brian. Yet the film is too sketchy about too may things. It shows us the exterior of his actual townhouse in London, but what about his hobbies? His taste in movies? Give us something beyond scenes that have that on-the-nose quality. In the last part of the movie, we needed to see more of how Brian’s relationship with the Beatles evolved. “Midas Man” implies that once the group was done touring, they almost didn’t need Brian anymore; that wasn’t the case.
And in the end, the film doesn’t swing far enough to the dark side. Brian Epstein died, on Aug. 27, 1967, of an accidental drug overdose. He was 32, and sitting on top of the world. Yet he had massive doses of uppers and downers in his system. This was one of those overdoses that had the absolute reverberation of a slow-motion, unconscious descent into self-destruction. “Midas Man” shouldn’t have tidied things up by leaving that chapter of his life a mystery. Brian Epstein deserves more than a watchable, serviceable, in too many ways threadbare biopic. Let’s hope that one day (maybe in Sam Mendes’ upcoming Beatles films?) his behind-the-scenes genius, and highly civilized joy and torment, will get their due.
