Picturehouse, Liverpool
Preview screening on 19th June, 2019
On general release from 28th June 2019
Reviewed by Ashley McGovern
Yesterday, the new Richard Curtis and Danny Boyle movie, should bring the Google board some welcome relief – regardless of any tax status anxiety. Whatever their reputation, the search engine giant will find its global domination confirmed in one of the funnier riffs in this film. It’s a saving grace for the movie’s lead, Jack Malik (Himesh Patel); whenever he casts doubt on his life and disruptions in world culture he consults Google for reassurance, its ubiquitous search bar waits for him to tap in a query.
His questions and their results from one of the better running gags in the film, heightened by his weird predicament. After a global blackout and a late-night collision between his bike and the local bus, Malik wakes up and finds himself the only person able to remember The Beatles. The global seizure has wiped swathes off the world’s pop cultural consciousness, and the loss of the Fab Four, more so than Coke and Harry Potter, is treated as high tragedy. (The fate of Nickelback is, I’m sad to report, never mentioned). As we go on, it becomes Malik’s mission to remember the records and release them as his own stuff – in a time of worldwide amnesia this cultural identity theft seems naughty but not unforgivable.
So starts Curtis’ story of Beatlemonomania, fame and recognition. Before his bike crash, Jack, played with brilliant warmth by Patel, was a jobbing local musician, low on talent, high on ambition; a sort of pie-and-a-pint folk singer, hitting up the bars and clubs without fanfare. All this changes when he starts bashing out ‘Let it Be’, ‘Yesterday’ and ‘In My Life’; the tracks prove just as popular as the first time around.
Like those toddlers plucked from YouTube and shoved into success, his complete transformation happens with amazing speed. Ed Sheeran soon becomes a mentor and at one point proposes a friendly song writing contest: he wants to see who can pen the best song in 10 minutes. The movie’s logic easily wins out. Jack cunningly comes back with ‘The Long and Winding Road’ and upstages Sheeran’s bleeding artery of a ballad. Greedy media moguls come after him and he’s lifted up to universal acclaim and chat show familiarity. But as with all tales of fame, it comes at a steep price – in all the gushing fandom, he’s left behind his one diehard fan, his friend and manager, Ellie (Lily James). She clearly loves him and he’s too shy to make a move.
Our romantic leads are on great form, though Lily James unfortunately gets the short straw. I’m not entirely sure why, but the movie’s costumers have dressed her character up like a blind cat sitter, all humdrum vintage fair dresses and dowdy shoes. (By chance I later came across the late Greg Giraldo’s heinously acidic roast about his friend and fellow comic Gilbert Gottfried i.e. the “sex appeal of a school bus fire”). Not that I’d go that far. Curtis and Boyle are whipping up a nice girl next door whimsicality, which James proved she can handle in Mamma Mia, but here can feel the strain every time the character is on screen; you feel the writing trying very very hard to be twee and humble.
Homage it certainly is, though so far it’s received complaints that Curtis and Boyle have merely proffered a superficial ‘Best of’ compilation. Weighted exclusively towards the songs that have come to define mass appeal, you may well complain – depending on how serious a fan you are – that a lot of The Beatles’ charm is taken away. This is a mistake, as is sententiously picking apart the whole alternate reality premise. Some critics have taken it upon themselves to embrace their inner physicist and become Stephen Hawking, questioning how the world would work if something like this actually happened. Please please me, don’t bother. It’s light summer rom com fair, appealing to the whole family, using as much in-depth knowledge of the four lads as a North West Tonight segment would require, and rolling towards an obvious but enjoyable reunion finish. Though Boyle has opted for some of the visual appeal of indie romance, this is what the film most definitely isn’t. It doesn’t want to reside in the hipster wing of summer rom coms, in which if the global glitch happened we’d get the movie Bingo Master’s Breakout, the tagline: imagine a world without The Fall.
If anything, it’s a good balance of different elements. Curtis usually operates in two modes; one is the easy-going elite class romantic farce. The second dimension of Curtisland being what you could roughly call time travel mode, in which you’d place About Time and the amateur historian oafishness of Blackadder. In Curtis’ favour, the two strands are united here in an enjoyable, pacy movie. British Pop artistry and the well-worn material of unspoken attraction do work together (the audience certainly clapped and laughed loads when I went). The humour is warm, comfortable and generalist, no cult insider lines just a teasing skewer here and there that stays its course and no more.
The more serious messages are fairly well handed too. Those who craft and market flash-in-the-pan pop products are made fun of and, most importantly, the issue of being ‘genuine’ is raised but never too bluntly. The indefinable quality of honesty, integrity and genuineness is something regularly discussed in music criticism. Yesterday happily points to the fact that Malik is half-remembering, half-conjuring the Beatles without any sense of their geography (hence the mid-film trip to Liverpool), any trace of their Scouse wit, any well of Northern melancholy that the actual Beatles had. Without this, how can he possibly perform this stuff with feeling?
Patel’s singing is excellent – his version of ‘Help!’ being the best in the film – and the conclusion is a predictable but satisfying rejection of the world of stadium pop. Boyle’s direction is energetic, though there are disconcerting camera angles, upshot and titled, that don’t add anything to the storytelling. For those who haven’t heard The Beatles in a while or who are seasoned fans of Curtis’ well-made rom-com three-acters, then definitely go and see Yesterday.