Running for Cover

Though I wasn’t expecting fireworks, I found the Danny Boyle film, Yesterday, disappointing. Among the many conceivable parallel universes, I never conceived of one where there never was a pop group called The Beatles. But that’s where Richard Curtis takes us in Yesterday. Jack Malek (played gamely by Himesh Patel), is riding his bike one night when a mysterious worldwide blackout occurs, causing him to be hit by a bus. Jack is released from hospital and, sans two of his front teeth, celebrates his survival with friends at an outdoor party. His girlfriend has bought him a new guitar for the occasion and he quietly strums it and sings the Lennon/McCartney song “Yesterday.” His friends are amazed and ask him when he wrote such an exquisite song. 

The comic potential alone of such a premise is substantial. Curtis could’ve gone the way Frank Capra had done in It’s a Wonderful Life – but for laughs – by imagining how terribly the world would be affected if John, Paul, George and Ringo had never been bandmates. But Danny Boyle and Richard Curtis decided, instead, to play it straight. The result raises some unavoidable questions. 

What was it that made The Beatles so successful? The film suggests that it was the quality of the songs themselves, the words and music, that made the Liverpool lads household names. This seriously short changes the performances, the voices of Paul and John, and their contributions as musicians. It also ignores the contributions made by George Martin, now regarded as the “fifth Beatle,” who was their producer from November 1962, who helped craft every one of their recordings – because it was the records themselves that made The Beatles world famous, that, by now, everyone has heard. I must have listened to some of the recordings, like “Penny Lane,” “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” and “Let It Be” scores of times in my life. I was 5 years old when I watched The Beatles appear on The Ed Sullivan Show in January 1964, and I was 12 when the band broke up in 1970.

But even with so shaky a premise, Yesterday might have succeeded, if only it weren’t so uninspired in its execution. I was unconvinced by Jack’s attack of conscience at his sold-out Wembley Concert at the climax of the film, when he confesses to the fans that, despite the fact that he was performing as many Beatles songs as he could remember (and the performances themselves are presentable, but hardly memorable) for the very first time, he didn’t in fact write any of them. The only really moving moment in the film comes when Jack discovers a 78-year-old man named John Lennon (played by the uncredited Robert Carlyle) living in a remote seaside house. He is utterly bewildered by Jack’s outpouring of emotion. (He tells him that he should seek psychiatric treatment.) The scene inadvertently suggests that Lennon was better off never having been a Beatle.