Imagine there’s no Beatles. It’s easy if you try…thanks to this delicious dream-team collaboration between Oscar-winning Director, Danny Boyle (Slumdog Millionaire, 127 Hours) and Oscar-nominated writer, Richard Curtis (Love, Actually, Notting Hill). It’s a wild premise about a young, aspiring, song-writer named Jack Malik (Himesh Patel) who has a – you-can’t-make-this-shit-up – accident. He gets hit by a bus. Cliché but true. When he wakes up, he soon discovers he’s the only person to remember the Beatles. Okay, whatever.
When his four close friends hear Jack perform Yesterday, Jack declares it’s a Fab Four classic, but they have no idea what he’s talking about. Jack, an otherwise Nowhere Man of a bloke, stocks grocery store shelves, rushes home to google ‘Beatles’ and instead of singers, ‘bugs’ come up. He googles ‘Sgt. Pepper’ and edible red peppers appear. Holy shit!
Yesterday appeals to a baby-boomer audience by way of ‘superior position’ – knowing not only the songs but something no one else except Jack knows. The premise is an entertaining ride as only Danny Boyle can deliver. On one hand, that’s what makes this movie most unusual since Boyle’s choice of films are ordinarily darker, certainly edgier, but always gratifying. But, like he did with Slumdog, Boyle adds an urgency, a pulsing beat, with calculated camera angles and infused hues of yellow-gold. Curtis, on the other hand, ties up sappy-sweet-moments up with a bow (think of Love, Actually.)
So here we are witnessing a Beatles’ blackout – call it a cosmic clash, call it fantasy, call it utter silliness – and Jack is left helpless albeit learning that he’s suddenly become the greatest thing to hit the pop charts. Skeptics will wonder if this could actually happen with Beatles music today. (On a sidenote: there’s an old Hollywood joke that if someone submitted the script to Casablanca and changed the names of the characters, no studio development person would ‘green light’ the project in present day. So, would Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds work in 2019? Hmmmm…probably not.)
Yesterday has a time-travel appeal (Curtis wrote 2013’s About Time)… but Yesterday is a celebration of 60s reflection, nostalgia, and awe, back when the Beatles took us on their first Magical Mystery Tour in their fantastical Yellow submarine.
But, HELP! Some might say that Jack is drinking the Beatle’s champagne through a paper straw.
It’s not Boyle’s fault that Curtis’s script is fairly lame. Sure, there’s the occasional witty one-liners like when Jack gets his two front teeth knocked out and refers to himself as a ‘reverse Jack rabbit,” but for the most part we can divide the brilliant Danny Boyle bits from the Richard Curtis goofy moments.
Patel is glorious and moody as the lead character who can really sing…channeling John, Paul, George and Ringo; possessing an almost opaque quality that allows the Beatles-less world to move through him, yet there’s little discovery in the revelation of the Beatles. Or is that impossible to accomplish? The depth, angst and hard work that goes into writing a song is never explored. Instead we snap from one scene to the next as Jack soars to fame in bit-size pieces of Beatles’ classics, desperate to remember the lyrics to, say, Eleanor Rigby, as he has no reference point in which to google the missing words. And isn’t that the point?
Maybe there wasn’t a way to expand on the creative process some movie critics are moaning about. Maybe since it’s all a freak accident there can’t be any depth. Maybe in the end, what you see is exactly what you get and what was intended. Afterall, if Jack didn’t actually write the songs, why would there be more plot or poignancy to what he delivers in the first place?
Maybe the true miracle of the film is the labor of matching all the Beatles classics to the pivotal emotional moments of each scene that keep the movie, well, moving.
Musical sensation Ed Sheeran joins the cast as himself. His ego comes into play for some fun moments in the film (like when he insists Jack should call a tune “Hey dude” instead of Hey Jude). And, what makes Ellie (Lily James) Jack’s quasi-manager-by-night, school-teacher-by-day so likable…is her belief in Jack, long before he was famous as the unknown Beatle. This lends some plot depth where All You Need is Love…over power and money. The two have a romantic relationship hinted upon yet it always seems to stagnate.
Debra (Kate McKinnon) adds to the mix as the manager to Sheeran, determined to launch Jack into the stratosphere. She represents what we assume the music industry might be like. Money-grubbing.
Audiences will adore this, critics might be critical in expecting more than is to be intended, but in the end Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da life goes on…