Heres a premise for the ages: a guitar-wielding singer-songwriter gets hit by a bus, wakes up, and discovers that the world no longer remembers The Beatles. He drops a Beatles lyric or two into casual conversation, as one does, and no one gets it. He plays “Yesterday” for his friends, and they think he wrote it. He googles The Beatles and gets results for actual beetles.
And not just that: cigarettes, Coca Cola, and Harry Potter are all gone, too, though their disappearance apparently has nothing to do with that of the Beatles. Yesterday, the movie in question, is an unabashed fantasy. My affection for Revolver and Hermione Granger notwithstanding, its universe verges on becoming a utopia of sorts—a world bereft of “coke” puns where no one likens promising political candidates to J.K. Rowling characters, argues you into the ground over the sanctity of the Beatles legacy, or dies of lung cancer.
In other ways, its clearly a nightmare. For one thing, singer-songwriter Jack Malik, played by Himesh Patel, has got some archiving to do. If no one remembers the Beatles and theres no record of their songs, someones got to get them all down on paper before they disappear completely; so far as he knows, Jack is the only person who remembers them at all. Hence the sticky notes on Jacks wall with the names of every song he can recall, and his frustrating attempts to recall every character (fireman? priest?) in “Eleanor Rigby.” Its not like hes got anything else to do; his own music career has crashed and burned.
Except now hes singing songs like “The Long and Winding Road,” and people are, of course, amazed. Because according to Yesterday, the Beatles music remains timeless, transformative, etc. There will be no rock-canon revisionism here, no matter the disappearing act of the premise.
Becoming the sole arbiter of the Beatles catalog is the best thing thats ever happened to Jack, whose recordings of the quartets songs get released online (with the help of Ed Sheeran, playing himself, and a vulturous agent played with scowling sarcasm by Kate Mackinnon__) and launch him to worldwide fame. That hes not a lanky white guy, but rather the brown-skinned son of immigrants, goes remarkably unremarked-upon.
Thats one of the best things happening in Yesterday—a movie that, though directed by Danny Boyle (Trainspotting, Slumdog Millionaire) and written by Richard Curtis (Love Actually, Notting Hill), feels like a Boyle/Curtis production in name only. Sure, there are a few instances of Boyles usual hyper-visual flair, an odd-angle shot and fantasy sequence or two. And sure, Curtis injects the script with hints of his trademark, cloying-but-low stakes lovebug wit. We all know were here for a romance. In this case, its between Jack and EllRead More – Source
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Vanity Fair
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