Yesterday Remembers the Beatles But Forgets What Made Them Great
Note: This piece contains light spoilers of Yesterday.
According to the new film Yesterday, all it takes to scale the pop charts is a guy, a guitar, and love—though the lyrics of two of the most celebrated songwriters in human history don’t hurt either. In the world of this collaboration between British filmmaker Danny Boyle (Trainspotting, Slumdog Millionaire) and screenwriter Richard Curtis (Love Actually), most everything is identical to our own, save for the existence of the Beatles. After a global power outage, the band is inexplicably erased from the cultural memory of everyone but one man, Jack Malik (Himesh Patel), a former schoolteacher and struggling singer-songwriter. Jack soon realizes that his brain contains a gold mine: If he can remember the lyrics to every single Beatles song and pass them off as his own, he’s more than set for the rest of his life. He becomes a viral sensation and leaves behind his home in England—and more importantly, his lifelong manager, friend, and love interest Ellie (Lily James)—to relocate to L.A. and link up with a steely boardroom shark (Kate McKinnon) who ruthlessly retools his image.
There’s endless, “Twilight Zone” potential for a concept like this. Considering the Beatles’ domineering impact over the last 50-plus years, it’s almost thrilling to imagine the creative possibilities in a world where they never existed. Would ambitious pop concept albums have come into fashion when they did? Would Brian Wilson have finished SMiLE as intended without “Strawberry Fields Forever” there to send him into a downward spiral? Would the Monkees or ELO or even Big Star have existed? What about the British Invasion? And who would we compare Migos to?
If you’re interested in a movie that hints at any of the above questions, you’re unfortunately going to have to make it yourself. (The only ripples in history caused by the absence of the Beatles are Oasis, cigarettes, Coke, Harry Potter not existing.) For all the lip service paid to the Beatles’ universal greatness, Yesterday doesn’t even seem to understand why anyone ever thought John, Paul, George, and Ringo were so brilliant in the first place. It wasn’t just their words, which Jack fights so hard to remember, that changed pop music—it was the gorgeous melodies and symphonic soundscapes those words sat atop. Besides some lovely lyrics, there’s virtually no mention of what the Beatles actually contributed to music—no nods to their experimentation with different genres and innovative recording methods.
The movie never really offers a sufficient reason as to why Jack’s take on the Beatles becomes successful, other than the fact that these songs were written by the Beatles, and the Beatles were geniuses, so of course their songs would tear up the charts no matter who records them, how they are performed, or when they are released. There are a few reasons for the public’s love of Jack Malik offered by the marketing shills who try to remake his earnest image: He’s not a team of 16 songwriters in a room and there’s no “featuring Cardi B or Justin Bieber,” just a baby grand piano and heartfelt words scribbled on a legal pad. Of course, there’s a double-edged irony here: Jack didn’t write the songs, and the relentless publicity machine behind him means he’s not the only one with a hand in his music. Under pressure from Ed Sheeran, whom Jack defeats in a songwriting competition, and his manager, the newfound star even changes the lyrics of “Hey Jude” to the supposedly more relatable “Hey Dude.”
All that matters to Boyle and Curtis is the sentiment of Beatles songs, and it’s an approach the film itself takes, too. Like Jack’s shouted, muddled-sounding Beatles covers, content—not craftsmanship—is king when it comes to Yesterday. Boyle is usually a visual maximalist, even when such flair is entirely unnecessary and unmotivated, but Yesterday is oddly drab, beyond a few bizarre, iMovie-like dissolves to transition between scenes. Himesh Patel and Lily James are charming enough leads, but their ill-defined characters are little more than scratch tracks. The movie would rather focus on an extended cameo by a self-effacing Sheeran, who has more studio recordings of his own songs on the movie’s soundtrack than the Beatles do.
Boyle and Curtis assume that a nice little love story, a reference to “When I’m Sixty Four,” and a flourish on the soundtrack that sounds like the cacophonous crescendo of “A Day in the Life” should be enough to appease Beatles fans. Maybe the Boomers this movie was made for don’t care what it looks like, but the Beatles were never so careless with the style of their own wildly imaginative films. Not to mention that there’s subversive potential contained within the movie’s premise: The entire history of rock’n’roll is white artists stealing from people of color, and now an artist of color is returning the favor and claiming the music of white artists as his own. But the movie never bothers to consider the kind of critiques its concept could be used to make.
Yesterday ends with a rousing sing-along of “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da,” a song that John Lennon notoriously regarded as just another piece of Paul’s “pure granny shit.” I suspect he might have used those same words to describe the Love Actually-ing of the Beatles’ legacy, too. The irresistible simplicity of songs like “She Loves You” or the conceptual complexity of albums like Sgt. Pepper’s alone weren’t what made the Beatles endure—it was both of those things in tandem. At least there’s comfort in knowing that, in our world, the Beatles’ meticulousness will be remembered. I can’t say the same for Yesterday.
Originally Appeared on Pitchfork
