Yesterday…How I Long for a Better Yesterday
Yesterday is film director Danny Boyle’s (Slumdog Millionaire) most recent effort as a filmmaker and another one of his sweet magical tales. Unlike films like Trainspotting, 28 Days Later and even the bittersweet Slumdog Millionaire, Yesterday is more akin to A Life Less Ordinary and Millions. Boyle is a flashy director and his work on Yesterday is as solid as any of his other films but its the treacly sweet screenplay by Richard Curtis (Notting Hill, Love Actually) that runs this gets this film into trouble. Ostensibly the film is labeled as a “romantic comedy” and to be sure there is this element, but this is not where the magic lies.
Himesh Patel sweetly plays the sweet Jack Malik, a struggling musician with dreams of becoming a pop star. The lovely Lily James sweetly plays the ever so sweet Ellie Appleton, Jack’s longtime friend and manager who valiantly encourages a frustrated Jack, after a disappointing gig at a music festival, to not give up on his dream. Jack, while riding his bicycle home during a global electrical blackout, winds up colliding with a bus and hospitalized. His manager Ellie, who clearly has an unrequited love for Jack, is there at the hospital waiting for him to regain consciousness.
Soon after released from the hospital and at a small gathering of friends for a welcome home party, Jack winds up playing Yesterday by the Beatles, but none of his friends seem to recognize the song or know who The Beatles were. Afterward he goes online and searches for The Beatles but it seems as if The Beatles never existed. Jack, a sweet and even good man does the unthinkable and begins passing off Beatles songs as his own.
Ellie pushes Jack to record a demo which leads to a television performance on a top of the charts type show, which then leads to Jack being invited to join a fictionalized Ed Shereen played by the real Ed Shereen in Moscow. Throughout this, Jack keeps discovering that other things besides The Beatles music is missing from his world since his accident during this global power outage. No more Coca-Cola, no more cigarettes, there’s no trace of the Harry Potter books or movies, and no such thing as the band Oasis! Imagine if it were The Rolling Stones missing in this world and Jack singing Satisfaction and confusing his audience with lyrics like “But, he can’t be a man because he don’t smoke the same cigarettes as me.”
The trip to Moscow is big for Jack but he can’t get Ellie to join him so another sweet character, Jack’s roadie Rocky, played dimly sweet by Joel Fry follows him instead. Following the event, Sheeren challenges Jack to a friendly deul of songwriters. When Jack sings The Long and Winding Road, Ed Sheereen, choked up and in awe, concedes. This moment leads to Shereen’s agent signing Jack and begins building his rise to pop stardom. Throughout all of this there are scenes that hint that Jack’s plagiarism is going to catch up with him.
It never really does catch up with him, at least not in any aha gotcha moment. Instead Jack, struggling to remember the lyrics to Beatle songs leaves Los Angeles where he is recording and goes Liverpool, England in an effort to spark memories of lyrics for songs like Penny Lane, Strawberry Fields and Elenor Rigby. The romance between Ellie and Jack remains flat even after Ellie had confessed she had always loved him. As sweet as Jack is he sure is self involved for a sweet plagairizing soul.
As sweet magical “romantic comedies” are prone to do, all works out in the end, and Jack winds up forsaking his pop-stardom for the love of Ellie, which is sort of odd since it was Ellie who always pushed him to pursue this dream only to turn around and inform him she can’t be a part of that lifestyle. It is these kind of inconsistencies that undermine the story as a whole.
I’m a big fan of Danny Boyles work and I didn’t hate this film, it’s just not as good as his much darker works or his Academy Award winning films Slumdog Millionaire and 127 Hours. The biggest problem with the film and certainly the script is the failure to connect the songs of The Beatles to this story in any meaningful way. It’s as if it was enough for Boyle and Curtis to simply posit; what if The Beatles never existed but you knew they did? It’s an interesting idea that ultimately winds up saying nothing about the people in this story and says nothing about us.