HBO's The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart will leave viewers in a state of awe

The Washington Post

"An exemplary lesson in how to make a revealing rockumentary, The Bee Gees (premiering Saturday) will satisfy lifelong skeptics and loyal fans," says Hank Stuever of the Frank Marshall-directed HBO documentary. "It’s less of the usual tract (we had them all wrong!) and more of a reckoning with the profound degree of artistry and accomplishment that should be the last word on any Bee Gees story. The movie is also a unique consideration of the phenomenon of rise and fall, and how one learns to live with it. Spending almost no time on a deep probe of the biographical 1950s family dynamics of the Gibbs of Brisbane, Australia, it instead heads straight into the recurring theme of success and fame as a matter of raw determination: Hugh Gibb, the father of Barry and twins Robin and Maurice, was a musician who simply believed his sons’ harmonizing vocals and knack for songwriting deserved as much or more attention than, say, the Beatles. He wrote to Beatles manager Brian Epstein and offered up his cheerfully ambitious offspring; Epstein handed them over to a subordinate, Robert Stigwood, and the rest is pop-music history. But what kind of history and why? This is where Marshall’s film succeeds. With archival footage and music cues that will invariably lure you out of your chair (or have you choked up during those achingly perfect chord progressions in the band’s ballads), The Bee Gees insists the Gibbs’ musicianship and prolonged success is as impressive as anyone in the rock pantheon. The film also has an adept awareness that such statements are always up for careful review and heated debate. No greater authority than Barry Gibb himself, the band’s sole survivor at 74, can confirm the ways in which celebrity stories, and images, change with time." ALSO: This is a rock documentary that doesn’t just recount a band’s rise, breakup, and successful reunion -- it invites its audience to see the band’s success from a deeper, more contextualized point of view.