#31 The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart

January 30, 2021
The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart (2021) ***
HBO Max
Free
Wildcard

This was another situation, which hasn’t happened for awhile, where it was midnight and I just couldn’t choose something to watch. None of the super short films on TCM were calling to me, it was starting to be a disaster.

Then I went on the HBO Max app and remembered that I wanted to see this documentary, even though it is over 2 hours. I also knew I wouldn’t be able to make it through the whole thing, but as long as I saw half before passing out, that is good enough for jazz. Or disco, I guess.

This is a wonderful documentary about a group that people kind of remember for one thing, but who were so much more than just Saturday Night Fever. There were four Gibb brothers, now Barry is the only one left, and it’s heartbreaking. Outliving everyone is not easy.

I myself was around during the disco era, and I did not care for the Bee Gees music at the time, mostly because it just lasted forever, that album was on the charts for 1 million years, and if you were in dance class as I was at the time, you got very very tired of routines that were choreographed to that soundtrack.

When I hear it now, it’s different. Now it is the music of my childhood and adolescence, so I love it because of the memories. And also, because it’s not on the radio every single second, I recognize how good those songs were, along with all of the rest of their catalog. The pre-Saturday Night Fever songs are absolutely wonderful!

They have a lot of period interviews with the brothers, looking back on that time, which are golden, along with interviews with performers both contemporary and those influenced by them, and some who could talk about very specific things. Noel Gallagher and Nick Jonas talked about working with your brothers, Chi’s Martin about being super famous and then having a backlash against you, Justin Timberlake about singing falsetto, you got a lot of insight. And of course, their band and people like that.

An interesting thing was the relationship between the brothers, both Barry and Robin were lead singers and songwriters with the ego to match, and Maurice was the one in the middle, the peacemaker, the connection between them, and also the one whose voice brought everything together.

So yes, I did only make it through half before being unable to keep my eyes open, but I watched the rest of it right away the next day. It’s a very good documentary, though it does seem to rush through parts of their lives and career too fast, but it’s such a long career that you can’t give weight to every single thing or it would be four hours and not two.