an existential cry about the forgotten
by
Douglas Messerli
Richard
Curtis (screenplay, based on a story by Curtis and Jack Barth), Danny Boyle
(director) Yesterday / 2019
Of
the three Beatles movies of which I write, the most recent, Danny Boyle’s Yesterday
is certainly the most fantastical. In a sense Boyle’s film, with a script by
noted screenwriter Richard Curtis (Four Weddings and a Funeral and Notting
Hill). As The New Yorker critic Anthony Lane argued, Curtis’ film
writing has always been about the possibility of people who love and need each
other not “coming together,” or coming together too late for their effective
collaboration to make sense.
In Yesterday, the coming together
did actually happen, but is inexplicably wiped away (along with a few
other events, the Harry Potter books, for example) in a twelve-second global
blackout, during which our unlikely hero, Jack Malick (Himesh Patel), whose
bike is hit by a bus and is sent hurtling through the air.
Up until this moment Jack has been a
mediocre Suffolk musician whose concerts are attended primarily by a straggling
group of four or so friends. Even desite his manager's love of him and support, he is convinced his career is ended. His guitar-based compositions just don’t have the magic necessary to allow him
a career. “It would take a miracle,” for his dreams to become reality, he declares.
But waking up in a hospital bed results
in just such a miracle, particularly when he discovers that no one around him
any longer remembers the Beatles. A Google search results in nothing but
pictures and information on bugs. The songs of the fab four no longer exist and
no one on earth, apparently, has ever heard them.
Jack urgently attempts to put their songs
back together, recalling the Beatles’ music, sometimes with great
difficulty—his parents and family friends, for example, keep interrupting his
piano rendition of “Let It Be,” suggesting that he change the title to “Leave
It Be”; at a later point record executives suggest he change the song “Hey Jude”
to “Hey Dude”—as resurrects their repertoire and begins to performs it with
great success. They are after all, amazing songs—and to give him his due Patel,
performs them quite brilliantly.
Indeed the casting of a Britisher whose
parents were of south Indian origin (his mother lived for a while in Zambia and
his father in Kenya), is perhaps the most brilliant aspect of this film. You
don’t have to go across the universe to appreciate the Beatles, their songs
breathe everywhere they exist. And Patel’s renditions of “Yesterday” and “Back
in the U.S.S.R” are among the best. But the very audacity of this kind of everyday
man becoming the sole repository of the Beatles’ albums is more than a little
touching. No mop-headed boy/man is often scruffy-bearded Jack.
As Malick becomes popular he is soon
approached by the noted singer Ed Sheeran (playing a fictional version of
himself) who invites him to be the opening act at one of his concerts.
All this is great fun, that is until
Malick is trailed by two others who somehow also survived the “blackout” and
know that he is a plagiarist. They explain that they don’t care as long as he
continues to keep the Beatles’ music alive. They even pass on a secret address,
which Malick visits, encountering a totally happy John Lennon, who, with his
wife, makes art (shades of what might have been his life with Yuko Ono had he
not been tracked down near the Dakota by his murderer Mark David Chapman).
Yet Malick is also is being tracked down
by his own conscience and is being trailed by his ex-manager girlfriend, who
needs to know just how committed he is to the money and the fame he has already
achieved.
Patel’s rendition of the Beatles’ song “Help”
in the midst of this crisis is so intense and poignant that I heard that pop
tune in a new way for the first time in my life. The Beatles sang it as a kind
lark, a staged trauma that one might imagine them feeling, surrounded by their
thousands of girl-admirers and their endless commitments. For Malick it becomes
an existential statement:
Help!
I need somebody
Help!
Not just anybody
Help!
You know I need someone
Help!
………
Help
me if you can, I’m feeling down
And
I do appreciate you being ’round
Help
me get my feet back on the ground
Won’t
you please, please help me?
In
his singing, this is a truly angst-driven song, a desperate plea for someway
out of the world in which his has found himself and cannot easily escape
without destroying his own life, those of others, and the lovely music he has
brought back into being.
I almost wish the movie could have ended
there, in a complete lack of resolution. Once you tell so many lies, perhaps
there is no way out. And it would have represented a brave statement of
irresolution that most movies are missing these days.
But Boyle’s film is also a fantasy. And
Malick, shocking everyone, admits his plagiarism and returns to the love of his
life in a literal rather than metaphorical (as in Across the Universe)
rendition of the ditty “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da,” life, apparently, just going on.
Los
Angeles, July 16, 2019
Reprinted
from World Cinema Review (July 2019).
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