Choices - Documentary and Educational Media

The Village Voice- April 14, 1992

A more humble and devout act of star worship is The Hours and Times, an elegantly no-frills chamber piece written, directed, produced, and edited by 30-year old Christopher Munch. This hour-long, black-and-white featurette (which has been collecting awards at festivals from Park City to Berlin and opens Friday for a week’s run at the Walter Reade Theater) lights a votive candle in the dark corner of another mass-cultural cathedral, casting a pale glow on John Lennon’s relationship with Beatles’ erstwhile manager, Brian Epstein.

Munch shot his deceptively self-effacing speculative fiction over the course of a week in Barcelona, then spent two years in postproduction. The result is a narrative of remarkable precision-conventional without seeming cliché, raising deftness and economy to a form of elegance. The action is bracketed by light-struck footage of the Barcelona harbor and, one flashback aside, unfolds during the course of a four-day holiday taken by Lennon and Epstein in April 1963, shortly after the birth of the former’s son and several months before the onslaught of full-scale Beatlemania that the latter so astutely midwifed.

While the trip gets three typically sleazy paragraphs in Albert Goldman’s Lennon bio, The Hours and Times is more respectfully oblique and more daringly psychological. The film is largely a dance of avoidance and attraction between the homosexual haute bourgeois Epstein and his ambivalent working-class protégé. Liverpool actor Ian Hart is voice-perfect and adequately bewigged as the pop star. His mercurial Lennon is a natural entertainer, alternately course and diffident while, cultivated and fastidious, David Angus’s Epstein is full of glum savoir faire-not unlike the movie itself. The locations are minimalist and neutral-an airplane, a hotel room, the extremely discreet gay bar where Lennon and Epstein pick up an urbane commodity trader and bring him back to their hotel. Here, as in every scene, Lennon’s capricious curiosity and Epstein’s hopeless yearning underscore a powerful mutual fascination.

Unrequited love may be the natural state of celebrity worship, but, unlike The Player, The Hours and Times is a movie of startling conviction. The pair of Beatles’ boots left outside John’s hotel door are as much sacred relic as period detail. When, wandering along the Ramblas, Lennon and Epstein agree to meet there a decade hence (April 30, 1973), an entire landscape is illuminated by the date- Epstein long dead, the Beatles defunct, the epoch the movie announces already fading out. Munch’s work is as steeped in eternal ambivalence as it is ancient history-it’s as true to the hours as it is to the times.

New York Magazine- April 13, 1992

The Hours and Times, the gripping debut of 29-year-old Los Angeles filmmaker Christopher Munch, offers a fictional account of one of pop history’s most intriguing footnotes: the trip to Barcelona that John Lennon took with Beatles manager Brian Epstein in the spring of 1963. Although the two were friends, Munch shows this holiday to be the collision of radically different worlds. Epstein was a prosperous Jew, Lennon a working-class Gentile. Epstein was vulnerably warm, Lennon swaddled in cool. Epstein had taste, Lennon genius. Most relevant here, Epstein was gay and yearned for his friend, while Lennon-but that’s what the movie is about. Shot in a nifty black-and-white and deftly acted by newcomers David Angus and Ian Hart (as Epstein and Lennon, respectively), The Hours and Times delivers on the gossipy allure of its subject without falling into cheapness or hero worship. Though only an hour long, it’s the most unexpectedly engrossing American movie I’ve seen this year.