Stir it up
A movie on Bob Marley is a big ask, Jake Coyle writes, and One Love tries but falls short.
BOB MARLEY was born in 1945, the son of an 18-year-old mother and a much older white man who had nothing to do with him. Raised in poverty, he often slept on the cold ground. Five years after moving to Kingston’s Trench Town, he made his first record, at 17. Not 20 years later, he was dead.
By then, Marley had become the face of not just reggae, Rastafarianism and Jamaica, but of revolution, resistance and peace. He left behind a body of work that has only grown more monumental with time. Think Redemption Song, No Woman No Cry, War, Trench Town Rock, Get Up Stand Up, Lively Up Yourself, and One Love People Get Ready.
So, yeah, it’s a lot for a movie.
Bob Marley: One Love, directed by Reinaldo Marcus Green, is a noble but uninspired attempt to capture some of the essence of Marley. Its lived-in textures and attention to Marley’s political consciousness, just by themselves, are enough to make it more substantial than many recent, glossier music biopics. But the power and complexity of Marley remains out of reach.
One Love takes a typical biopic framework, plotting itself around the leadup to an important concert but, when footage of the real Marley plays over the credits, it’s a painful contrast to the pensive but inert movie that played before it.
Ben Kingsley-adir, the talented British actor of One Night in Miami… and Barbie, has clearly got the voice, Marley growl and lilt of his Jamaican accent. But what the performance is missing — an absence so clear when the real Marley turns up — is the physical dynamism and charismatic velocity of Marley.
The sheer vibrancy of Marley, who spent afternoons playing soccer and had at least 11 children in his short life, would undoubtedly be a tall order for most films. One Love, set in the aftermath of a 1976 shooting that wounded Marley, follows a more contemplative Marley in self-imposed exile in London — on tour in Europe, recording the 1977 album Exodus and ultimately receiving a diagnosis of cancer.
Marley was by many accounts a private man rife with contradictions. One Love appears to have wrestled with finding a single portrait, and its patchwork pacing occasionally shows signs of that struggle.
Early in One Love, Marley and his band assemble in a smoke-filled living room to play I Shot the Sheriff, and it’s moments like these that work far better than those in the public eye.
The performance that bookends the film is the One Love Peace Concert, which was put on in Jamaica in 1978 as a way to heal the divided, violent country. Marley, during Jammin’, brought the rival party leaders Edward Seaga and Michael Manley on stage.
The turmoil in Jamaica weighs heavily on Marley throughout film; images of fields aflame run repeatedly as a reflection of his memories. Though largely set in Europe, the real through-line of the film is Marley as consumed with the plight of his countrymen, and others in similar situations around the world. When white executives push back against touring in Africa due to its lack of infrastructure, he replies, “So we build it.” How all of this percolates in Marley and gets filtered into the music is what One Love is about.
“The music and the message are the same thing,” Marley explains.
The events of the film are years after the breakup of the Wailing Wailers so Peter Tosh and Bunny Wailer are little seen. The most notable supporting roles go to Lashana Lynch as Rita Marley, his wife, and James Norton, as Island Records founder Chris Blackwell.
Though One Love in spirit remains fairly true to Marley but what is harder to forgive is the lacklustre music performances peppered throughout. When One Love should be, as Marley was, striving for transcendence, it feels like it's going through the motions. Come on, you want to plead, and stir it up. —AP