In ‘Midas Man,’ a by-the-numbers tribute to the fifth Beatle
The Brian Epstein flick suffers from biopic malaise
Jacob Fortune-Lloyd as Brian Epstein in Midas Man. Courtesy of Signature Entertainment
By PJ Grisar January 15, 2025
Beatles manager Brian Epstein was infamously eulogized by a rabbi who didn’t know him. Following a private, Orthodox burial, Rabbi Norman Solomon called Epstein, who died at 32 of an accidental overdose,“a symbol of the malaise of our generation.”
It was a stunning description of a man whose acumen transformed a scruffy quartet of Liverpudlians into megastars, launching the British invasion and forever changing the course of popular music. The new film Midas Man, about Epstein’s time with the Beatles, his sexuality, drug addiction and his Jewishness, makes the case for a man who lived in Technicolor, but was dogged by darkness.
Starring Jacob Fortune-Lloyd (Queen’s Gambit), Joe Stephenson’s film, with a script by Brigit Grant and Jonathan Wakeham, lays out its evidence with Epstein narrating his own life, until he loses the plot.
An expository conversation with his parents inside their empty shul establishes Brian’s initial ambitions to be an actor and his success as a salesman for the family firm, a furniture shop.
Epstein tells us how he “turned a shelf in the back of the store into the talk of Liverpool and one of the biggest record stores in the Northwest.” One day after he gets an order request for a record out of Hamburg, he goes to see a certain rock band play the Cavern Club — “the moment my life changed forever.”
Meet the Beatles, who are going nowhere, man. With Pete Best on drums, they’re clad in their leather duds and guzzling beer during the set (we’re spared the infamous onstage chicken-eating). Stephenson, with a cast of mostly unknowns beat Sam Mendes’ promised Beatles quadrilogy to the punch with his quartet, who you eventually get used to, even though John (Jonah Lees) stands a whole head shorter than Mr. Epstein.
Epstein approaches them with a proposition: Stick with him and he’ll take them to New York. Soon we’re whipped up into montages including their moptop makeover, a series of record execs (identified by label logos on the walls behind them) wagging their heads and their rise in acclaim underscored by “Money.”
Bundled with cliches, Midas Man operates in a subtext-free zone, with foreshadowing and dramatic irony serving as dialogue and well-known incidents (“rattle your jewelry”) standing in for character development. If you’re satisfied by seeing cigar-smoking chaps in their ritzy clubs about to eat imminent crow after claiming “there’ll be more, much better bands,” and yucking it up when Epstein says his boys will be bigger than Elvis, you’ll come away satisfied. (Or you might, like Elvis, shoot your television.)
But, if you were hoping for a serious engagement with the hidden life of Epstein, who was gay in a time when homosexuality was illegal, the film largely flails, unsure of how to split the difference in tone. At one point, when Epstein meets his partner Nat Weiss (James Corrigan) in New York after booking Ed Sullivan, I correctly anticipated a toast of “l’chaim,” after Epstein spied his future roll in the hay — and part of his downfall — at the bar.
Fortune-Lloyd delivers a solid, suitably tormented performance and the tenderness of his relationship with The Beatles, and his brilliance at stage managing their scandals, is handled well — though it struggles to make John Lennon’s “more popular than Jesus” remark land as a genuine crisis. (It was, but can’t help but seem absurd now — even the Vatican thinks so.)
Credit where it’s due: some of the Jewish details, notably a Kriah ceremony (the tearing of the garment), are enough to justify its spot on the opening night of the New York Jewish Film Festival (and the Toronto one).
That funeral for the tearing isn’t Epstein’s — we merely get epilogue text and a poetic image to see him through to the hereafter. The final picture of his life comes closer to the words of another rabbi, presiding over a later ceremony that included the Fab Four, who attended in black-paper kippot.
Rabbi Louis Jacobs said Epstein “encouraged young people to sing of love and peace rather than war and hatred.”
Indeed we see that, ending on the Beatles’ satellite broadcast in the 1967 Our World special, before Epstein crosses Abbey Road to shuffle off this mortal coil.
But as for the dazzling packaging its subject was a wizard at, Midas Man comes closer to the assessment of that first rabbi. Missing Epstein’s golden touch, the film has a case of biopic malaise.
The film Midas Man is playing at the New York Jewish Film Festival Jan. 15-16. Tickets and more information can be found here.
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