Yesterday could have been so much more
There’s not a musician alive who hasn’t dreamed of having written a song by someone else. Not only that, every musician has daydreamed about living in another era.
Learn one or two songs by Jimi Hendrix and you’ll one day find yourself drifting back to the sixties, sometime before Jimi started backing the Isley Brothers, using his style to wow audiences and incorporating it into your own band. Before you know, you’re an icon.
If only, you might think, I could go back in time with these skills and start something before it happened. It’s really strange to think that the idea hasn’t been made into a movie before now, although Marty McFly did catch the ear of Marvin Berry at the Enchantment Under the Sea dance in 1955, who got his cousin Chuck on the phone.
Yesterday is a film of wish fulfillment for a failed or failing musicians, where the hero of the story gets to approximate success without having much of the required talent. It’s an interesting premise, to be sure, but for some reason the filmmakers decided not to explore it fully in favor of creating a by-the-numbers Hollywood romantic comedy. There’s a lot more to see under the surface of the film had the filmmakers been interesting in searching for it. They didn’t, however, so the film is only mediocre.
Jack Malik (Himesh Patel) lives in Suffolk, England and hopes to be the next big star. A former teacher, he left his profession to spend his time busking on the pier or playing in coffee shop gig arranged by his manager, Ellie (Lily James). Ellie, who is also a teacher, has been infatuated with Jack ever since she saw him play “Wonderwall” on stage in middle school. She is his constant encourager, as Jack seems ready to throw in the towel at any given time.
After a low-turnout gig at a local festival, Jack once again tells Ellie that he is quitting. He leaves to return home that night, where he lives with his parents, riding his bike with his guitar in tow, when a sudden worldwide power outage causes him to be hit by a bus. He is instantly Freaky Friday-ed into a world where the Beatles and their music have disappeared from everyone’s memory (along with Coca-Cola and cigarettes and other things, seemingly at random).
Suddenly, the shadow hanging over him starts to fade, since he has an entire arsenal of life-changing pop songs at his disposal. Success is at his fingertips, so long as he can remember the lyrics.
As I said, the premise is interesting but underdeveloped. For a film that seems to worship the Beatles, it doesn’t seem to value their influence on music in general. The only measurable difference in the world Jack now occupies is the concurrent disappearance of Oasis. It’s played as a joke, of course, but the Beatles were far, far more influential than one average band fronted by angry Englishmen from Manchester.
The question becomes less about Jack and more about how the music world evolved without the Beatles. What does it even sound like?
Another idea that the film presented but all but instantly abandoned is this: what if Jack is still unsuccessful, despite being armed with the best rock and roll songs ever written? Are the Beatles transcendent or were they locked into that particular part of history? That, I think, would have been a far more interesting film.
Instead, the film takes for granted that the world would instantly fall in love again, no matter who was attached to the music, and focused on a bland love story between Jack and Ellie.
It’s easy to throw stones, of course. The film didn’t make me angry or waste my time. And of course, any time you get to hear the Beatles in the course of your day makes it a good one. Performances are all adequate. The script thinks it’s funnier than it is and the running time felt long given where the premise ultimately ended up.
I’d say that it’s a film that would do better on a streaming service than in the theater, but the showing I attended was fairly full. Maybe the Beatles are as transcendent as the film insists.