The music of The Beatles comes alive in ‘Yesterday.’ |
HIMESH PATEL STARS IN “YESTERDAY.”
Boomer rock is all over the movies these days.
“Bohemian Rhapsody” and “Rocketman” rummaged through the lives of Queen and Elton John, respectively — though those films’ detractors might prefer the verb “ransack” — and became hits in the process. Now, the music of the Beatles will be pouring out of multiplexes all summer long thanks to “Yesterday,” Danny Boyle’s pleasant trifle of a rom-com that may feel more like an elevator pitch than a fully formed film — “Hey, what would happen if one man woke up in a world where The Beatles never existed?” — but it’s just diverting enough to keep from sinking under the weight of its concept.
Himesh Patel ( British TV series “EastEnders”) is Jack Malik, an English musician whose dreams of stardom are slamming hard against the nightmare of his bleak reality. At best, he performs for a handful of buddies and his childhood friend/ roadie/manager, Ellie (Lily James). Even what seems like career salvation — a slot at a major rock festival — ends with him playing a small, near-empty tent while the bulk of the concertgoers remain oblivious outside.
He’s about to hang it up when fate intervenes. While riding his bike home one night, all the lights begin to go out, not just in his neighborhood but all around the planet. It’s a 12-second global glitch that plunges him into such complete darkness that the driver of a city bus can’t see
Jack and plows right into him, knocking him unconscious. When Jack awakens in the hospital, everything seems normal, aside from some missing front teeth, of course.
It’s not until much later, when he’s back home and playing a song for friends, that he notices something’s wrong. He sings The Beatles’ “Yesterday,” and they go crazy, thinking it’s one of his originals. They claim to never have heard of these Beatles of which he speaks. Sure enough, he heads to Google to find that typing in “Beatles” just brings up “beetle,” the bug.
Realizing that he’s now living in some skewed universe where the Beatles never existed, he hatches a plan to sell their songs as his own and propel himself to superstardom.
As long as “Yesterday” is about Jack’s pop plagiarism and lust for fame, the film works as a send-up of music-industry narcissism and shameless hucksterism. Kate McKinnon, playing Ed Sheeran’s
manager who wants this suddenly hot newcomer as a client, is often hilarious, even if it seems she skated in from another, broader movie or, more accurately, a “Saturday Night Live” sketch. And, yes, a deadpan Sheeran is quite funny as a version of himself who’s a major Jack Malik fan. (For the more NPR-inclined, singer-songwriter Michael Kiwanuka also appears.)
But “Yesterday,” directed by Boyle (“Slumdog Millionaire”) from a script by Richard Curtis (“Love, Actually,” “Notting Hill”) that’s based on a story from “Simpsons” writer Jack Barth, also is as much “rom” as “com,” and this is where it falters. It turns out Ellie wants to be more than Jack’s manager, and their relationship doesn’t rise above the expected.
That’s too bad as it takes away from the conceit about how this new, Beatles-free universe works. As it turns out, the Beatles aren’t the only things missing from the old world, and that raises questions about whether Jack’s new reality should be far more disorienting and disturbing than it is. And would such ’60s songs as “Let It Be” and “Hey Jude,” detached from the social revolution of which they were a part, have the same impact in a 2019 universe where hip-hop exists but The Beatles do not?
But, since this is neither “The Twilight Zone” nor “Black Mirror,” “Yesterday” doesn’t wrestle with these questions. Instead, it goes for an easy sentimentality, which is fine as far it goes. But it could have been something both funny and thought-provoking. As it stands, the crowd-pleasing “Yesterday” opts for the former and often achieves its goal.
The performances are all enthusiastic. Patel, who has a strong voice, is especially likable and endearing in a star-making performance. That makes “Yesterday” the kind of movie that is entertaining at the moment but evaporates like an ice cube on a Texas highway in August once the credits roll.
That’s not necessarily a bad thing. Any movie aimed at a mainstream audience that can wedge in jokes about such cult bands as Neutral Milk Hotel and Pulp deserves some applause. And it’s notable that the filmmakers cast someone of Indian descent in a role for which his race has absolutely nothing to do with the plot. (Along with “Always Be My Maybe” and “The Sun Is Also a Star,” score another one for Asian representation and portrayals of young Asian men in Hollywood movies that approach being three-dimensional.)
As they used to say on Dick Clark’s “American Bandstand” back in the days when The Beatles first landed in America, “it’s got a good beat, and it’s easy to dance to.”