"The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend A Broken Heart" (2020 release; 111 min.) is a documentary about the famed pop trio. As the documentary opens, we hear the disco-charging "Stayin' Alive" over the opening titles and then go straight into a live concert from 1979 in Oakland. We flash forward to "Miami 2019" as Barry Gibb, the only surviving member of the Gibb brothers, rues "My immediate family is gone". From there we go back in time to when the Gibb brothers were just young lads growing up on the Isle of Man before the family relocates to Australia. It is there that the lads find their first taste of success... At this point we are 10 min. into the documentary.
Couple of comments: this is the latest project from Frank Marshall, best known for his production work (including for Steven Spielberg), but here he directs what is clearly a labor of love about the long and complicated history of the Gibb brothers. If you ask anyone today what the Bee Gees stand for, almost certainly the answer will be "disco" or "Saturday Night Fever". And of course they were that, very much so. But as this delicious documentary reminds us, they were more than that, in fact so much more than that. It feels like the Bee Gees had, like cats, nine lives, or at least four or five (pre-SNF, the 1975-1981 disco era, the immediate post-disco era, and the latter days). Along the way we get treated to a bunch of archive footage that certainly I had never seen before, and of course also the 'talking heads', including Justin Timberlake, Eric Clapton and most interestingly Nick Jonas and Noel Gallagher, both of whom also performed as brothers in a band. There are some heavy duty moments in this documentary when we are reminded of the deaths of younger brother Andy Gibb (for whom the Bee Gees wrote a bunch of songs), and then twins Maurice (in 2003) and Robin (2012). But in the end the music prevails, and on that count, it still feels to me that the Bee Gees are underappreciated, even though they are rightly so in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. I love their disco stuff, but I equally love their late 60s/early 70s pre-disco output (think: "Massachusetts", "World", "I Started a Joke", "Words", etc.). Such great songs.
"The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart" premiered this weekend on HBO and is now available on HBO on Demand and other streaming services. If you have any interest in the history of rock music, or are simply a fan of the Bee Gees, I'd readily suggest you check this out, and draw your own conclusion.
