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Yesterday review – Richard Curtis' magical mystery tour of a world without the Beatles
A hopeless songwriter wakes up to find he’s the only person who can remember the Fab Four’s hits in a wacky, winning comedy directed by Danny Boyle
Peter Bradshaw
Sun 5 May 2019
Loveably rubbish … Himesh Patel as Jack in Yesterday.
Photograph: Allstar/Working Title Films
Imagine no Beatles, it’s not easy even if you try. No Yesterday, no Blackbird, no Sgt Pepper ... and then … no Imagine, no all-time best Bond theme (Live and Let Die), no all-time best comedy band name (Ringo Deathstarr), no Concert for Bangladesh to inspire Live Aid, no Withnail & I, no Life of Brian – but then again, no Charles Manson. In a Beatle-less universe, Mike McGear could be Bono’s producer and best mate and Jeff Lynne is president of the world. Screenwriter Richard Curtis’s goofy, wacky, exasperatingly enjoyable fantasy-comedy riffs on ideas like these with a story co-written with Jack Barth – although it turns out TV’s Goodnight Sweetheart got to the idea first. It is directed with dash and gusto by Danny Boyle.
Maybe it shouldn’t be any sort of evaluative factor, but the simple fact of hearing Beatles songs, the simple thought experiment of pretending to hear them for the first time, does carry a charge. And, although this film can be a bit hokey and uncertain on narrative development, the puppyish zest and fun summoned up by Curtis and Boyle carry it along. It’s ridiculous and indulgent at all times, like Russell Crowe shouting his “Are you not entertained” line from Gladiator wearing a Beatles wig. Yet there is weird and heavy backwash of sadness at the end, a kind of melancholy comedown, and I can’t quite decide if that was intentional or not.
Best mates … Himesh Patel and Lily James.
Photograph: Allstar/Working Title Films
Himesh Patel (from EastEnders and Channel 4’s Damned) steps up amiably and confidently to his starring role as the classic Richard Curtis lovably-hopeless-and-rubbish character with a supportive gallery of friends; he gets a wild stroke of fortune that could never ever happen in real life. But that’s enough about the fact that his best mate is Lily James who is probably in love with him.
Patel plays Jack, a useless bloke from Lowestoft who works in a retail warehouse and has big dreams of making it as a singer-songwriter. On evenings and weekends, he and his guitar show up at awful pubs, gigs secured by his superfan, de facto manager and miraculous quasi-Platonic-but-not-really friend Ellie (James) who has believed in him ever since school when she saw him playing Wonderwall, of all the hilariously quasi-Beatle standards.
But then one night, at the exact moment that Jack loses consciousness due to a non-serious road accident, a gigantic electrical storm lashes across our solar system, frying planet Earth’s space-time-reality-consciousness continuum, and, after a brief power-out, existence has been changed: the Beatles never existed. (This is incidentally every bit as scientifically accurate as anything in Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar.) Jack realises that he is the only person unaffected. He is the only human being who remembers the Beatles songs and can pass them off as his. And so his climb to super-mega-greatness begins.
Saboteur … Ed Sheeran with Himesh Patel in Yesterday.
Photograph: Jonathan Prime/AP
There are lots of laughs and goosebump moments, especially when Jack plays his new song Yesterday to his saucer-eyed mates, and later realises he has to frantically piece together the lyrics for Eleanor Rigby from memory because Google can’t help. Ed Sheeran has a nice good-sport cameo as himself, as the big star who discovers Jack and then has to come to terms with the fact that he is Salieri to Jack’s Mozart; and, in all his mediocrity, he winds up attempting to sabotage Hey Jude.
Arguably, the story as it pans out is a bit straightforward: there is no question of, say, some Beatles songs going down better than others in the present day. Moreover, Curtis scholars will see how Yesterday is a gender-switch version of Notting Hill, featuring an ordinary guy getting a brush with uber-glamour, with Joel Fry in the Rhys Ifans role of stupid best mate. There wasn’t much for Kate McKinnon to get hold of in the role of the nasty LA manager, but the onward rush of silliness compensates.
Of course, we’re heading for a colossal final cameo(s), and I was reasonably sure I knew what form this was going to take – but I was wrong. This big walk-on moment is every bit as sentimental and extravagantly sugary as everything else. For the first millisecond, though, it really will take you aback. As fab as it could reasonably be expected to be.
www.indiewire.com
‘Yesterday’ Review: Not Even the Beatles Can Save Danny Boyle’s Generic Musical Fantasy
The film manages to inspire a truly funny performance from Ed Sheeran, but “Yesterday” gets tripped up on all the basics.
David Ehrlich
Sunday 5 May 2019
“Yesterday”
If not for an endearing cast and some occasional splashes of Richard Curtis’ signature British charm, “Yesterday” would be a complete waste of its clever premise — not to mention the money it must have cost to license 17 of the Beatles’ most famous songs. As it stands, this sweet but vacuous exercise in suspending disbelief is an overstuffed and underwritten misfire; a studio-engineered crowd-pleaser so convinced “All You Need Is Love” that it loses sight of some other essentials along the way: Believable characters, elegant pacing, a script that develops an actual heart instead of just nodding its head to a steady drumbeat of Hallmark emotions. For a movie that manages to inspire a funny and self-effacing performance from Ed Sheeran, “Yesterday” gets tripped up on the basics.
The premise, dreamed up by one-time “The Simpsons” writer Jack Barth, is ingenious for how specifically it taps into a fantasy that should be familiar to anyone who’s ever longed to create something as miraculous as their favorite music. It begins with Jack Malik (golden-voiced “Eastenders” star Himesh Patel, talented as no tomorrow but handicapped by a one-note role in his big-screen debut), a struggling musician who’s this close to giving up on his dreams of fame and fortune. After 10 years of busking on the streets and playing the same few bars in Sussex, he’s one lousy gig away from putting his guitar away and becoming a teacher. The only person more disappointed in Jack than he is in himself is his best friend and biggest fan, Ellie (Lily James, winsome as ever), the beautiful girl next door whose single-minded crush on him has grown so large that it flattens them both into two-dimensional characters.
So far, so familiar. But then, a miracle: The entire planet loses power for 12 seconds and Jack gets hit by a bus. Well, that’s not the miracle — the miracle is what comes next: A few hours after leaving the hospital, Jack realizes that he’s the only person on Earth who remembers the Beatles. He makes a reference to “When I’m Sixty-Four,” and Ellie blinks at him blankly. He sings “Yesterday” to his friends with the new guitar she bought him for encouragement, and they’re all shellshocked. It doesn’t take Jack long to realize that he’s in the most good-natured episode of “The Twilight Zone” that Rod Serling never wrote; he can have everything he’s ever wanted; he just has to take it from four blokes who nobody else has ever heard of — not in this timeline, anyway.
If you’re hoping that “Yesterday” might grapple with — or exhibit so much as the slightest curiosity about — the idea of what might happen if someone (let alone someone of Indian heritage) introduced the Beatles’ extraordinary back catalogue into the modern cultural landscape, then you might need to readjust your expectations. Curtis, who’s basically the Shakespeare of schmaltz, couldn’t possibly care less about how the absence of “The White Album” might have affected the last half century, or what it might feel like for contemporary music fans to be confronted with “Come Together” in the age of Coldplay.
YESTERDAY/WORKING TITLE FILMS/DANNY BOYLE
The film imagines a world where Himesh Patel's character can pass the Beatles' songs off as his own
Curtis’ screenplay, while sometimes highly amusing in self-contained moments (e.g. Jack trying to play “Let it Be” for his distracted parents), treats the conceit as though it were merely a complication for the generic rom-com underneath. Despite having the elements for an unusual star-is-born saga that flirts with potentially fascinating aspects of authorship and maybe the most epic case of imposter syndrome ever diagnosed, “Yesterday” is nothing more than a classic story about some dumb boy chasing his chintzy dream instead of recognizing the reality that’s been staring him in the face the whole time.
Alas, Danny Boyle is the last director who might have tempered Curtis’ worst instincts and anchored “Yesterday” to some kind of appreciable human depths. He and Curtis — two maximalists whose best work (“Notting Hill” and “Sunshine,” respectively) explores what happens when relatable characters are launched into out-of-this-world circumstances — are a match made in hell. Both can be brilliant when they tap into the right material, and both can feel hopelessly desperate when they’re trapped in a corner. Together, they’ve created a film that’s always too much and never enough.
Rather than investing viewers in Jack’s rise to fame, and grappling with the gut check that it requires of him, Curtis summons a deus ex Sheeran to swoop in and launch the protagonist into the stratosphere. Sheeran is great in an unexpectedly significant role, hostile but helpful as the self-described Salieri to Jack’s Mozart, but he’s no substitute for legible character growth. Rather than slowing down to capture Jack’s experience with fame, or grounding the story to convey the impact of thinking someone wrote “In My Life” for you, Boyle steams ahead into absurdity. At one point, he condenses an entire act into a meaningless light show that recalls the worst moments of “Steve Jobs” in how it reduces profound human emotions into the stuff of raw stimuli. While that choice helps contribute to the kind of dream logic that drives the film’s plot, it also emphasizes why that approach is such a misstep for a story that’s never as real as it needs to be.
There are dozens of cute moments, and Curtis introduces some delightful wrinkles into the film’s concept (and, at a crucial moment in the third act, a truly dreadful one), but these micro joys don’t compensate for the macro issues. In a film that requires its audience to engage in some Herculean suspension of disbelief with each new scene (we’re supposed to expect that, in the year 2019, an unknown artist’s breakthrough single could open with the lyrics “She was just 17 / yeah you know what I mean?”), it’s deadly that the simple romance at the story’s core is the hardest part of it all to swallow.
YESTERDAY/WORKING TITLE FILMS/DANNY BOYLE
More than 6,000 extras turned up to be in the film
Jack is a handsome lad with a beautiful singing voice, but “Yesterday” never affords Ellie any deeper reasons to love him. Jack takes her for granted at every turn (as she eventually points out), he leaves her in the lurch whenever he can, and he spends almost the entire movie in one kind of anguish or another. To a certain extent, it’s obviously the point that Jack can’t enjoy his success without being able to share it with Ellie — not that the film offers a credible reason as to why he can’t share it with Ellie — but the character is so miserable for so long that he also never endears himself to us.
It’s a shame, because Patel deserves all of the recognition that Jack doesn’t. Not only does he sound exactly like a young Paul McCartney when he sings, but he radiates charisma in a way that makes him easier to believe as a superstar than it is as a school teacher. James, a brilliant singer who’s become the secret weapon of every movie she’s in, never even gets a crack at a duet. The actress is buoyant and appealing enough to have chemistry with a hole in the ground (or the male lead of a “Mamma Mia!” movie), and there’s no doubt that she and Patel could have played an electric couple in a film that wasn’t so determined to sell them short, but she’s wasted here. Joel Fry (as Jack’s idiot roadie) and Kate McKinnon (as his money-grubbing manager) have a lot less responsibility in their supporting roles, and they both deliver enjoyably broad comic performances that resuscitate the movie time and again.
But even when things get truly surreal and Jack is performing “Back in the U.S.S.R.” to thousands of screaming fans at Wembley Stadium, “Yesterday” still feels like it’s all been done before. There’s an unshakable cognitive dissonance to a movie that attaches so many clichés to such a high-concept premise, and by the time the sun goes down on this peculiarly small-seeming fable, not even Curtis’ usual tear-jerking tenderness is there to cushion the blow; your guitar will be the only thing that gently weeps. This disappointing misfire doesn’t even leave viewers with a renewed love for the Fab Four; by suggesting that the world would be virtually the same if the Beatles had never come together, “Yesterday” almost makes you wish that they hadn’t.
Grade: C-
Universal Pictures will release “Yesterday” in theaters on June 28.
A concert scene was staged with Himesh Patel appearing on top of the roof of Gorleston's Pier Hotel
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