Imagine there’s no Beatles, it’s easy if you try…
When I first heard the premise of Yesterday, I was excited. As
a life-long Beatles fan, a career-long Richard Curtis fan and someone with at
least an affection and appreciation of Danny Boyle’s films, this seemed like a
match made in heaven. A mystical genre film in the vane if Freaky Friday or any
of a dozen other films where the main character is unhappy with their life and
wishes on a star; fountain; talisman; lighting strike etc., for change and lo
and behold, change is delivered with all its fantastic complications.
In this case, it’s a mysterious loss of power world-wide
that wipes the memories of the world, or resets the world into a parallel universe
where many significant elements of our known world are missing – for Jack
Malik, the biggest of these is the lack of the Beatles. That’s right; they
never existed. Only a few found themselves removed from the effects of the
force that erased the elements now missing – like the Beatles, and in Jack’s
case, his exemption came by being hit by a bus while riding his bicycle.
Suddenly, with his memory of Beatles’ tunes, he becomes this
new world’s greatest singer-songwriter, seemingly able to come up with perfect
songs any time he picks up an instrument. Ed Sheeran chances on Jack singing on
local Suffolk public access TV, and needing a late replacement to support him
on tour; Ed signs Jack to a tour of Russia. When they play in Moscow – Jack
wheels out Back in the USSR, and on and on we go.
The problem is, where do you go from there, and it is to the
credit and immense talent of Richard Curtis that this film does go somewhere.
The cast is excellent, with Ed Sheeran proving his acting chops extend further
than sitting around a campfire and pulling focus from an extraordinary cultural
phenomenon that was GOT. Himesh Patel as Jack plays confused, guilty and
undeserving extraordinarily well, and he can sing, although he’s up against it
having to recreate the entire Beatles playlist. Lily James is sweet and
adorable as the girl who always should have been the one, and the supporting
cast do everything they need to do, with Sanjeev Bhaskar and Meera Syal as Jack’s
parents standing out as they lovingly patronise and indulge their singing son.
Joel Fry does an admirable job as Rocky, the socially inept,
but loveable weird best friend, who helps and hinders, with nothing but the
best of intentions and delivers some of the films funniest lines. I couldn’t
help feeling the character was a direct lift of Rhys Ifans’ Spike from Notting
Hill, but when you write funny characters of quality, as Richard Curtis
does, we forgive him for going back to that same well.
So what is the problem with Yesterday? Why did I walk away
feeling ho-hum and not thoroughly entertained? It’s because the premise is as
good as you can get. In an interview, Ed Sheeran commented that any person he
tells the premise to gets it in a single sentence and immediately understands and
wants to see the film. There lies the problem – the setup and concept are so
good that what happens next, like the reference to fame within the film, becomes a poison chalice.
If Jack becomes the greatest singer/songwriter in the world
and lives his life as a superstar, there would come a point where the fantasy
delivers nothing more than the premise and no character growth, and that growth is what
films in this genre trade on – Jim Carrey in Liar Liar, Freaky Friday or Peggy
Sue Got Married. If Jack doesn’t learn and grow as a person, we’re watching
Biff’s story from Back to the future, where Biff gets Marty’s sports almanack
and leads a charmed life as a rewarded A-hole.
Again, it’s down to Richard Curtis to pull some rabbits out
of the hat, and he does so in surprising ways – ways I have already seen
derided and dismissed as sentimental whiffs in reviews, but to me, they are the only things
that have stayed with me from the film.
Spoiler alert starts here. All the above is a derivation on
the premise and apart from the Back in the USSR scene gives nothing new
away, but to talk about the hard turns
the film pulls to keep it safe from washing up on the rocks of mediocrity, I have
to talk about specific spoilers.
Jack is set up to have a conscience, never being
comfortable ‘stealing’ the world’s greatest single band songbook and passing it
off as his own – and this is a sound choice because anything else would have many Beatles fans up in arms over this apocalyptic world where their idols
never existed, and now have their legacy usurped. Instead, from the very
beginning, we’re aware that Jack feels uneasy about passing the Beatles work
off as his own. At the concert in Moscow, we see a large middle-aged
man amongst the crowd who hears ‘Back in the USSR’ and this fan emotes his
confusion on hearing the song. It’s a hint, a flicker of an omen that Jack’s comeuppance
is in play – and any film goer will read this trope and predict what is to
come.
This thread continues when Jack visits Liverpool to source
the places we all know so well from the references in Beatles songs. Here is
another subtle, yet loving homage to the greatness of the Beatles, when Jack, as a
fan and a musician who sang many of their covers, struggles to remember so
many songs. I’m a huge Beatles fan, and I couldn’t for the life of me remember
who did what to who in Eleanor Rigby – and Yesterday
gets a lot of mileage from this very fact. During Jacks visit to these iconic
locales, we see a woman who recognises the now famous Jack, and she stares at
him oddly. Again it’s not overplayed, but we all know what’s coming – and this
is where Curtis subverts the trope and manages to deliver something memorable
and worth more than a Disney-esque mystical genre film – at least to Beatles
fans if to no-one else.
At a press conference before the concert to launch Jack’s ‘greatest
double album the world has ever seen’, a concert where a desperate version of
Help from Jack, highlights the show, we see the fan from Moscow and the woman
from Liverpool waving a yellow submarine. Again it’s a warning that jack’s comeuppance
is near, as Yellow Submarine is yet to exist in this new world.
After the concert, the two come to see Jack backstage, and
the moment he sees their yellow submarine, he knows the jig – or in this case,
the gig – is up. Jack tries to explain his plagiarism, only to be stopped and
told by these fellow Beatles fans, who also retain a memory of the music, how
thankful they are to Jack for saving the songs and letting the world hear them
again. The two explain they aren’t musical, so they couldn’t do what Jack’s
done, and they only came to say thank you. Jack finally has others who
understand his moral dilemma, and the woman from Liverpool thrusts a note into Jack’s
hand with only the cryptic clue, that she did a lot of digging to get the
information and she feels it will help ease Jack’s guilt.
Sure enough, Jack heads to a picturesque seaside farm, where
an old man with a crooked nose and round spectacles lives out the last years of
his happy life in peace – it is John Lennon, played believably in old age by Robert
Carlyle, and in this new, recalibrated universe, John is alive and well.
Yes, it’s saccharine sweet and throws up all sorts of parallel
universe conundrums, but it re-enforces the film as one written with the highest
respect for the Beatles and nothing but reverence towards the fab four.
Ed Sheeran is all too willing to indulge in some self-deprecating
good humour as he shows a good dose of respect and humility towards any
comparison between his talent and that of the Beatles – and the Long and Winding
Road/battle of the songwriter’s scene is the best moment of the film.
The rest is
mainly forgettable or even disappointing. That’s an unfair critique because the
film is a well written, well directed, well-performed piece of escapism that is
enjoyable to sit through and will no doubt play for years on smaller screens. Herein
lies the danger of a great premise. The premise of Yesterday is so good that it ranks alongside the now legendary
Hollywood pitch – “Danny Devito and Arnold Schwarzenegger are twins” – and from
there, where do you go?
The only possibility is to let people’s expectations
down. In this case, because of the skill, talent and awareness of the tropes
and playing against them, those great creative minds have at least let us down
gently.
Yesterday gets a 6.5 out of ten, or in Beatles terminology,
it falls somewhere between Abbey Road and the White Album.
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