Review: Yesterday (2019)

I am a Beatles fan; perhaps not as obsessive as some, but it wouldn’t take more than a few days for me to notice if they had been erased from history, musical or otherwise. The premise of writer Richard Curtis (Love Actually) and director Danny Boyle’s (Trainspotting, Slumdog Millionaire) Yesterday is just that: imagine if the Beatles—all their songs, their public personas, all of it—suddenly disappeared from history. Initially, no one seems to realize it except a failing musician, Jack Malik (Hamish Patel), who was just about to give up on his musical career when a strange accident strikes that apparently alters a few details about our reality. When Jack plays a few Beatles songs for his stunned friends and starts sharing a few of the tunes, passing them off as his own, he attracts fame and stardom as he fills a void left in the music world by the absence of these legendary works of popular music.

Except, that void is hard to see. While Yesterday is in many ways a perfectly serviceable, high-concept romantic comedy, the film suffers from a lack of imagination around realizing the impact that the absence of the Beatles would have upon the landscape of popular music. What ends up happening is that the film strangely sells short and undermines its own premise, which is that the 213 songs recorded by the band, separate from any larger aesthetic or historical context, are all world-changing works of art and would be hits in any era.

I don’t think I’m just overthinking what is clearly meant to be a whimsical celebration of one of my favourite bands’ catalogue of music; the failure to really consider how works of art function as both a reflection of culture, or the impact they have beyond purely aesthetic categories speaks to some of the larger issues I have with both Curtis’s script and Boyle’s direction, issues that are reflective of the way we understand cinema’s relationship to fantasy and reality more broadly. But this failure also seems like it goes against the set-up the film establishes. Instead of merely a “what if” imagining, the film goes out of its way to present a quasi-speculative fiction account of why Jack can remember the Beatles when so much of the world cannot.

One night after another failed gig, following a disagreement with his manager and long-time best friend/unrequited lover, Ellie (Lily James), Jack is riding his bike home when a global power-outage strikes at just the moment Jack is hit by a bus! Upon his recovery, his friends ask him to play a song, and he plays “Yesterday.” When his friends are dumbstruck by the amazing song they assume Jack has written, and reject his protestations that it was written by “The Beatles,” a band none of them has heard of, he realizes that the Beatles have been erased from history, global consciousness, and his own record collection. The narrative effect of this cosmic event creates a neat before and after, marking a crisis point in Ellie and Jack’s relationship, which will need to be resolved, with their inevitable partnering, by the end of the film.

Jack soon finds himself on the road to stardom, thanks to local superstar, Ed Sheeran (playing himself throughout the film), and before he knows it, he is recreating the meteoric rise that the Beatles themselves did, experiencing a Beatlemania complete with roof-top concerts and screaming hordes of women. But of course, Jack is wracked with guilt, at passing off the Fab Four’s compositions as his own, and, more importantly, for not choosing Ellie’s love over fame and fortune. Hamish Patel and Lily James are a compelling onscreen couple, so the love plot isn’t a major issue. It reminds me that James is one of the best emerging starlets of the last decade, but oddly, she did more and was more fun in the surprisingly good musical-fantasy sequel, Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again, than she is here. While ABBA are not close to the Beatles in my book, that film understood and embraced the absurdity and its fantasy vision in a way that Yesterday, for all its high-concept, fails to dig into.

The film is to a great degree more concerned with the romantic comedy plot than the actual ramifications of the Beatles’ absence. Because, despite several other deviations between our own world and the parallel one that Jack finds himself in (in this world there is no Coca-Cola or cigarettes, among other things), it’s hard to really see how the absence of the Beatles drastically changed the world, even the world of music. The film drops the names of plenty of other bands, from Coldplay to Neutral Milk Hotel (with Ed Sheeran in the aforementioned key supporting role), who it is hard to imagine existing if the course of pop music history had unfolded without Paul McCartney, John Lennon, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr (though there is one solid gag referencing a Manchester band that would most certainly not exist without the Beatles). I can’t help but think that the butterfly effect of the band’s absence could have been more cinematically and fruitfully explored, especially if you’re going to go the route of suggesting parallel universes and altered timelines in the first place.

As I alluded to above, the film feels very double-minded about the Beatles. On the one hand, it suggests that the songs alone, even coming decades after their original debuts, in a context that they neither influenced nor have a history in, would still be instantly seen as the greatest songs ever written. Look, I love the Beatles, as I stated at the start. But even I couldn’t believe for a minute that a pop-punk cover of “Help” would be hailed as one of the greatest performances of all time in a world that still has the legacy of the Rolling Stones, David Bowie, and others. But on the other hand, the film does suggest that the Beatles’ absence wouldn’t majorly change music. Most things would carry on as they had anyway, and the music industry would still be structured around marketing and fame in a way that was directly pioneered by the Beatles among others. If anything, the farcically avaricious agent and manager played by Kate McKinnon suggests that the Beatles’ absence has made music even more commercially crass!

It leaves me both skeptical as a fan, but also genuinely curious as to what would have happened. I’m not saying the film had to be rigorous in mapping out a detailed alternate reality, but the film’s only truly bold decision in imagining the impact of the Beatles’ absence is in one late sequence, in which, spoiler alert, Jack goes to visit an aged John Lennon, who having never been a Beatle is still alive, living a quiet, contented life by the sea. Lennon dispenses some boilerplate romantic advice to Jack—particularly absurd coming from Lennon, with his notoriously volatile relationship history—that he should return to Ellie, suggesting that ultimately the absence of the Beatles saved John Lennon’s life and made him happier! It’s a strange undermining of the entire idea of the Beatles as being great, and left me wondering what happened to the other members of the band. But it also suggests a stranger and more daring version of the film than what we got.

One of the issues is that as filmmakers, Curtis and Boyle are quite good at crafting individual moments, but also fairly stuck in their filmmaking ruts. Richard Curtis can be counted on to tug on the heartstrings, despite consistently writing characters that behave unlike anyone in reality would. His romantic Britain is already a fantasy. Boyle can craft a decent sequence, but here his filmmaking is often at odds with the emotional tenor of the story; the film is full of montages, and in some sequences onscreen labels and texts are placed into the shot with flashy computer effects. Boyle seems compelled to remind the viewer that he is the director with these visual flourishes, rather than letting the story speak for itself. While individual moments work, the film itself is a bit of a mess, relying on the shorthand of sitcoms and Curtis’s previous romantic comedies, rather than even referencing the visual work of directors who worked with the Beatles, such as Richard Lester. Perhaps someone like John Carney (Once, Sing Street), who can do romantic yearning and yet create compelling characters and settings, would have been better suited to the material.

Yesterday is too indebted to the formulas of popular music and romantic comedies to make a case for the actually daring and groundbreaking impact of the Beatles. I have a grudging respect for Richard Curtis and his ability to wring affective responses from what would otherwise be the most cringeworthy or false sequences. Thus, people looking for a formulaic romantic comedy should enjoy the film, but it is hardly the best example of this kind of genre entertainment. Likewise, Yesterday focuses on the most surface level signifiers of the Beatles, so that for anyone with more than a casual love of the band, it feels like a missed opportunity.

5 out of 10

Yesterday (UK/USA)

Directed by Danny Boyle; screenplay by Richard Curtis, based on a story by Jack Barth and Richard Curtis; starring Hamish Patel, Lily James, Ed Sheeran, Kate McKinnon.

Related Posts