directed by Danny Boyle
written by Richard Curtis, Jack Barth and Mackenzie Crook
Contrary to popular belief, even amid the bombastic superhero blockbusters of the North American summer season and the dead-serious, self-important awards fare of the end of year, there is room for other movies that aren't out to make all the money or win all the Oscars to carve out their own little niche. Their success or failure rate can vary, but sometimes, just sometimes they can really hit the sweet spot with just the right audience. One such example is the charming "what if?" romantic comedy, Yesterday.
Yesterday is the story of Jack Malik (Himesh Patel) a struggling twentysomething musician living in Suffolk, England who works part-time and sings anywhere from empty pubs to sidewalks to try to find his audience. About his only fan is his manager and childhood friend Ellie Appleton (Lily James), and after Jack plays at a virtually empty tent at a music festival he decides to finally throw in the towel. On the very night he does so, however, something strange happens: all around the world, for twelve seconds, everyone loses electricity, and as result, Jack, while riding his bike, is unable to see the bus that then clobbers him.
When Jack wakes up, he learns that apparently the Beatles have been erased from everyone else's memory but his own, to the extent that not even a Google search can turn them up (which, weirdly enough, is the case for a seemingly random assortment of other bits of popular culture like Coca-Cola and cigarettes, among other things) and as can be expected, once Jack realizes what has happened, he decides to cash in on this amazing gift. It takes a while for people to catch on, but when pop superstar Ed Sheeran (played by, well, Ed Sheeran) catches wind of Jack's--phenomenal "songwriting talent," he takes Jack under his wing, introducing to a life Jack had only dreamed of, and to his cutthroat manager Debra (Kate McKinnon) who plans to milk Jack for everything the Beatles' songs are worth. It's all coming true at last for this struggling musician, but will he be able to handle the fame, fortune and all of the trappings that will inevitably come with claiming to have authored some of the greatest rock songs in history? And, will he be able to live with the fact that he's only getting all of this because of someone else's work?
The movie is a ton of feel good, goofy fun, even though its premise has almost as many holes as a time-travel movie. Patel is genuinely charming as the down-on-his-luck Jack, and he does a wonderful job covering the Beatles if I'm honest. It's not mimicry but loving homage, and for my part I can see why he got the job. It's gratifying that the character appears not to have been written as Indian, as a result of which there isn't any gaudy treatise on Indian culture or some self-conscious discussion on the inevitable interracial romance between Jack and Ellie, whose adoration for Jack is fairly obvious from the very first scene they share. This is diversity at work: when a person of color slips effortlessly into any given role without the script having to trumpet the issue of his race every chance it gets.
Patel and James carry the movie almost effortlessly, even when the script blunders into "unfortunate cliche" territory. Also adding to the fun is Joel Fry as Rocky, Jack's boisterous roadie, a self-deprecating Ed Sheeran as himself, and Sanjeev Bhaskar and Meera Syal as Jack's loving, wonderfully comic parents. Kate McKinnon gets the short end of the stick playing an oily, one-dimensional bad-guy and what makes it worse is that she doesn't even seem to care.
Still, there's enough to like about this movie to sit through it and its fantastical, if sometimes clumsily handled premise. I know that quite a few reviewers were expecting more from this film than a feel-good romance, but given that this was the writer who gave us such unabashedly maudlin fare as Notting Hill and Love Actually I'm not really sure why. Well, I liked it, anyway.
7/10
No comments:
Post a Comment