This article brought to you by Rim Chiropractic
Article by Nathan Hurlbut
Imagining a world without The Beatles would seem like musical sacrilege to many. There are few musical groups that could claim to be as influential or culturally significant as the Fab Four; within their amazingly short decade-long existence, they changed music history forever.
Yet, that is exactly the premise of the film Yesterday, a frequently funny and undeniably entertaining movie that never aspires to be much more than that. Considering its crazy, fantastic premise, the movie could have pursued this notion into much more intriguing territory. Instead, the filmmakers opt for a more conventional and familiar love story route in the end, denying the movie’s true potential as something both magical and memorable.
Himesh Patel is Jack Malik, a struggling musician who, after a disappointing festival appearance, is on the verge of throwing in the towel on his music career. The only thing that seems to keep him going is the unconditional support of his manager Ellie (Lily James), who has had a secret crush on him since they were kids.
Bicycling home one fateful night, a global power failure knocks out more than just the lighting grid, but some of Jack’s front teeth as well when hits a bus and is knocked unconscious. Waking up in the hospital, Jack discovers a world that has changed- there is no Coca-Cola, there are no such thing as cigarettes, and, most importantly, the Beatles never existed. Jack soon begins to exploit the situation by performing beloved Beatles songs as his own, reviving his sagging musical career to levels he never could have expected.
The film, of course, features a killer soundtrack, perhaps most pointedly when Jack leads a spirited, garage rock-influenced version of ‘Help!’ to the masses as a true cry for help once he realizes the desperate situation he’s found himself inescapably trapped in. Kudos to Ed Sheeran for his participation here as well, as he lends the film a degree of musical credibility as well as a professional rivalry with Jack that is satisfyingly complicated. Best of all, Sheeran’s ability to make fun of himself provides some of the film’s funniest moments, such as when he suggests changing the name of the song ‘Hey Jude’ to ‘Hey Dude.’
The movie’s greatest strength may be how wryly funny it is, as when Jack searches the internet for more mysterious disappearances and discovers that a band like Oasis never existed since The Beatles weren’t around for them to later imitate. Equally amusing is a board meeting where record company executives inform Jack that an album title like ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’ is just silly and laughable, and a title like ‘The White Album’ would be racially insensitive (by an Indian performer, no less!).
Along those lines, Kate McKinnon wonderfully plays Sheeran’s sociopathic agent Debra Hammer, whose complete disregard for social etiquette (or humanity in general) is a frequently hilarious bit of music industry satire. Her performance is actually much better than the character she is given to work with, as Debra herself represents a pretty one-note, simplistic figure in the end.
This simplicity and the film’s light tone are both its appeal and its shortcoming as well. The story eventually loses its way from the intriguing, ‘Twilight Zone’-like premise into a fairly conventional and underdeveloped romance movie. Jack and Ellie’s romantic situation is certainly sweet enough, but remains underwritten, and Ellie’s adorable but one-dimensional character doesn’t serve as much more than a plot device in the story. As a result, the attraction and longing between the two remains more superficial than meaningfully explored. The result makes their potential relationship an unconvincing reason to surrender a rock star life where you are worshipped as the greatest songwriter in music history.
The movie makes a better case for that sacrifice by effectively showing Jack’s growing ambivalence concerning his plagiarism, and his paranoia of being discovered as a charlatan recurs with nightmarish frequency. One of the film’s best scenes has Jack being met backstage by perhaps the only two other people on Earth who actually share Jack’s memories of the Beatles. His internal panic at being called out as a fraud is met with their sincere gratitude, as they confess how happy they are to hear Beatles music again after they thought it had been lost forever. This pivotal scene helps propel the movie towards a climax where Jack reconciles with the artistic responsibility he has to help contribute back to the world’s culture what has been lost.
At the same time, this particular scene is also typical of the feeling that director Danny Boyle and screenwriter Richard Curtis are pulling their punches here. They both seem intent at curbing the movie’s more adventurous impulses to create something more conventional and formulaic. Ironically, if the Beatles themselves had similarly curbed their more artistically adventurous impulses, the real world would never actually have such musical masterpieces like ‘I Am the Walrus,’ ‘Strawberry Fields Forever,’ or the entire ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’ album. The genius of the band was that they were able to be both immensely popular and artistically daring at the same time. While that may be a lot to expect from a single movie, the filmmakers of Yesterday would have been wise to take more careful notes concerning that accomplishment.
Rated PG-13.