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YESTERDAY (2019)
Director: Danny Boyle Cast: Himesh Patel, Lily James, Kate McKinnon, Joel Fry, Ed Sheeran, Sanjeev Bhaskar, Meera Syal, Harry Michell, Sophia Di Martino, Ellise Chappell, Justin Edwards, Sarah Lancashire, James Corden MPAA
Rating: Running Time: 1:56 Release Date: 6/28/19 |
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Review by Mark Dujsik | June 28, 2019 There are so many potential routes that director Danny Boyle's Yesterday could have taken and so many tantalizing questions that it could have explored. Instead, Richard Curtis' screenplay simply maneuvers a nifty premise into a generic and familiar corner. Here's the premise, by the way: A struggling musician awakens in a hospital, after being hit by a bus during a momentary worldwide blackout, and discovers that the Beatles never existed. There is no explanation for this strange occurrence, which is fine, and there's also no apparent logic to it, which is slightly less fine. We discover that other things do not exist in this alternate timeline/dimension/whatever it is, such as cigarettes and a certain brand of soda, which suggests that some earlier thing disappeared from this new/different reality to stop the Beatles from forming. At least one member of the band does exist, since we see him decades after he should be dead, but maybe one or more of the others do not, because of that now-absent thing. We also learn that the band Oasis no longer/never formed, which is pretty amusing, but now we have to consider how many other bands and musicians, influenced directly or indirectly by the Beatles, never took up music. Would popular music even be the same if the Beatles hadn't been? The mind reels. All of this is played as a gag, which is certainly one, far-from-curious way to play this setup. It could have been much, much more. There doesn't even need to be an explanation of science/fantasy or the resulting chain of events that led to such a massive empty space within culture that the Beatles would have occupied. The void and its repercussions are fascinating enough. Beyond that, there's another layer, since our protagonist still can recall the lyrics (well, most of them, because just try to recite "Eleanor Rigby" by heart), the melodies, and the basic chords of those songs. What was it about the Beatles that made them last beyond the point when people suspected they were just a fad? Could a random person replicate the impact of the band, simply by way of the music? What, really, would it be like to hear these songs for the first time now? If some of the tunes simply appeared out of nowhere today, would things like wanting to hold someone's hand or mocking surf rock with a ditty about the Soviet Union even resonate with people? These are the intriguing questions, and they're all evaded with some jokes or simply ignored, because, above all else, this is a hollow celebration of the Beatles' music. A real celebration would really consider what the music—or the lack thereof—means, but there is, after all, a straightforward plot—about an ordinary guy being thrust into the spotlight and realizing, perhaps too late, that true love has been right there in front of him—to get to instead. The struggling musician is Jack Malik (Himesh Patel), who's about to give up on his dreams of making it as a singer-songwriter, much to the disappointment of his best friend/manager Ellie (Lily James), who clearly loves the guy as more than just a friend/manager. Then, he's hit by that bus, and none of his friends recognize "Yesterday" when he plays and sings it for them. A thorough internet search reveals that the whole world has no knowledge of the Beatles, because the band never existed. Seeing an opportunity to make it big, Jack re-composes all of the Beatles tunes he can remember and sets out to become a successful musician with the band's reconstructed catalog. What happens next has been the stuff of so many rise-to-fame stories that it's almost pointless to repeat. The biggest hitch, perhaps, is that Jack is living with an ethical dilemma that no one else would recognize, even if he confessed his plagiarism publicly (This point is forgotten during the climax, but when the rest of the movie doesn't care much about the consistency of its central conceit, that's hardly a substantial inconsistency). Even that, though, doesn't really matter, because the central question isn't of right and wrong but of becoming famous, losing the life one had in the process, or shunning fame for what one really wants. It's always curious how no one considers some kind of middle ground in these stories. After all, Jack becomes the most famous musician in the world, even before a single song of his via the non-existent Beatles is released to the public. Surely, he could convince his new manager Debra (Kate McKinnon), who knows that his album will be a wild success, to let him spend some time with Ellie. As for Ellie, beyond the necessity of keeping the two characters apart for as long as possible, what is the definitive, immovable obstacle in her starting a relationship with Jack, who realizes and more or less says that he has feelings for her, too? The most pertinent question, though, is why any of this matters in a story that possesses such a clever, rife-with-possibility hook. Yesterday just follows the motions of its sudden-stardom and shallowly troubled romance stories, while giving us decent covers of more than a dozen Beatles hits in the process. Copyright © 2019 by Mark Dujsik. All rights reserved. |
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