Yesterday

Title: Yesterday

Director: Danny Boyle

Writer: Richard Curtis

It’s 2019 and Nostalgia is king, prince, emperor and all-powerful, all-consuming dictator-for-life. In the months ahead, there’s a new Terminator movie coming, a ninth Star Wars movie, while a new version of Dune is on the horizon, and Disney continues to self-cannibalize by remaking its entire back catalog in terrifyingly photorealistic CGI. It’s as though we’ve agreed that as a culture we’re fresh out of ideas, everything is horrible, and we’d much rather ignore it all and focus on the good old days of approximately 1960 to 1985.

Remembering things has never been more popular, and remembering music is the best kind of remembering there is. There’s nothing that quite conjures the carefree, idyllic, mildly traumatizing, socially awkward and spotty days of youth more than Nirvana, Pearl Jam and, um, Men Without Hats (shit, I don’t know). The entertainment business, its fingers ever on the pulse and wallet of the globe, has taken notice. After the screaming smash success of 2018’s Queen bio-pic slash Live Aid reenactment Bohemian Rhapsody ($900M sales vs. $52M budget) and the, um, existence of 2019’s Elton John soundtrack Rocket Man ($195M vs. $40M), making a movie to flog the music of the Beatles was probably a no-brainer, the lowest of the hanging fruit on the great money tree.

To its great credit, Yesterday manages not to come across as a cynical cash grab, and more of a slightly saccharine, inarticulate fan letter. The story, by screenwriter Richard Curtis, has Jack Malik (Hamish Patel), a struggling songwriter who gets hit by a bus, then wakes up in a world identical to our own, except that nobody knows what Coca Cola, Harry Potter or cigarettes are ... and nobody’s ever heard of the Beatles. Realizing the opportunity he’s been presented with, he promptly sets out to record and sell all the Beatles songs, passing them off as his own.

The set up and opening are charmingly funny and feature some great lines and sight gags, such as Malik getting his two front teeth knocked out by the bus and calling himself a “reverse rabbit”, or Malik Googling Beatles cover-band perfectly legitimate artists in their own right Oasis, and finding they don’t exist either.

However, once Malik finds success as a singer the movie shifts gears to focus all its non-Beatles-singing time on a frustrated romance between Malik and his manager, best friend and unrequited lover, Ellie Appleton (Lily James). It is quite possibly the most boring, predictable love story ever set to film, as simple as Ringo Starr’s drumming, as deep as “All You Need is Love”, as moving as “I Am the Walrus.” As a result, the intriguing premise goes largely unexplored, just the Beatles and a couple of random other things don’t exist, but everything else is exactly the same. But hush now, dear viewer, look: People who should be together not quite connecting!

Danny Boyle, of Trainspotting and Slumdog Millionaire, doesn’t seem to have known what to do with the material, and throws in a bunch of artsy shots like slow-motion and tilted camera angles, which add nothing to our appreciation or understanding of the scenes.That feels kind of symptomatic of the script, not really sure what it should be doing with its premise.

However, Patel plays the slightly bumbling, desperate and lost Malik with a lot of charm, and it’s really his movie, although Ron Weasley-slash-Smeagol impersonator Ed Sheeran does make an appearance, to no great effect other than for people to go, “Huh, yup, that’s him.” Especially in the scenes before Malik hits the big time, the first part of the movie exudes a kind of warm and cozy charm, and I kind of wish the movie-makers had stuck with that.

I do also kind of wonder whether, as the movie kind of hints in its first third, the Beatles would really be successful if they released an album now, in this, the year of our Lord two thousand nineteen, in competition with the Ed Sheerans and Lady Gagas and “Uptown Funks” and “Old Town Roads” of this world. Or is that a silly question? No, they wouldn’t. Of course they wouldn’t. Success in the music business is a crap shoot, a game of luck, a matter of being in the right place and time, and another place, another time, wouldn’t be the right ones. The scenes of Malik rocking Wembley Stadium are far less believable than of him playing Yesterday to an indifferent and inattentive pub crowd.

Were the Beatles even that great? There’s a heretical thought. Stripped of their historical setting and of the boyish charm of the Fab Four, do the songs really stand on their own? In this respect at least, the movie has been a success: I’ve gone back, looked up “Strawberry Fields” and “Here Comes the Sun” and “Back in the USSR” and “Hey Jude” and “Revolution” and found there’s still a lot to like, a lot to appreciate. Score another victory for Nostalgia.