Imagine there’s no Beatles. It’s easy if you try… according to inexcusably lazy comedy Yesterday, which proposes that, absent the incalculably enormous impact the Beatles have had on not just music and pop culture but upon culture itself, the world would nevertheless look exactly as it does today. Which seems impossibly unlikely, and also feels like a huge insult to the Fab Four.
The unexplained high-concept here: One night there is a momentary worldwide electrical blackout that lasts for only a few minutes, during which struggling singer-songwriter Jack Malik (Himesh Patel) is hit by a bus and knocked unconscious. After he wakes up, he slowly comes to the realization that he’s the only person who knows about the Beatles and their music. He discovers this only because he starts playing “Yesterday” on his guitar, and his friends — including his manager, Ellie Appleton (Lily James: The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, Darkest Hour) — think it’s a new song that he himself has written. Google confirms it: there has never been any such band as the Beatles. Has Jack somehow slipped into an alternate universe? Is God a Rolling Stones fan (they still exist here) and used the blackout to erase all evidence of the Beatles from history and from everyone’s memory? Thanos Snap?
Whichever the case — and it really doesn’t matter — it’s just an excuse to tell yet another story about a not very talented guy who enjoys unwarranted success, for Jack goes on to “write” and record all the Beatles songs, which turns him into a global phenomenon. Because of course the songs are terrific… to our ears, in the cultural context in which we know them. But would “I Want to Hold Your Hand” really have the same impact, brand-new, in 2019 as it did in 1964? How would “Eleanor Rigby” or “Let It Be” land today? The Beatles’ songs exist in a bizarre vacuum here, literally excised from the social and artistic environment in which they were written and performed and received. Songs like these, like all of the Beatles’ work, are so very much of their particular moment in time — which of course is part of how and why they endure — and there’s no sense of that in Yesterday. (I don’t think timeless means quite what this movie seems to think it means.) These songs would surely sound odd, anachronistic, maybe even random if they were presented as created now.
Perhaps the weirdest thing about Yesterday is that it isn’t even a revue of Beatles’ music, like those shows that end up on Broadway and in the West End, and now are transferring over to movies, as with Mamma Mia! Only a few of the songs are actually performed in anything close to their entirety. It’s all mostly just a one-note running joke about how no one except Jack knows all those famous Beatles lyrics and tunes, combined with a blah romance: Ellie is naturally in love with the oblivious Jack, and now is losing him to fame and fortune. Patel, an Indian-British TV actor making his feature debut here, is charming enough (and, small favors, at least it’s not another white guy sailing to unearned adoration). But Yesterday is, at its very best, inoffensive to the point of blandness; even Kate McKinnon (Ferdinand, Office Christmas Party), in a small part as a Big Music shark who latches onto Jack, is only briefly allowed to bring her usual glorious spark to the screen. At its worst… well, there’s a moment toward the end of the film that is so cheaply manipulative that it feels like a punch in the gut, and not in any good way, and leaves a sour taint over the whole endeavor.
I’m sure director Danny Boyle (T2 Trainspotting, Steve Jobs) and screenwriters Richard Curtis (Trash, About Time) and Jack Barth imagined they were paying tribute to what is probably the greatest band in the history of rock ’n’ roll — and maybe some of the most profoundly influential people in the history of humanity — with this movie, which is replete with their songs (or snippet reminders of them) and with a whole planet of 21st-century people newly discovering them and going crazy for them. But it utterly defangs the music we know and love so well, diminishes its significance and the meaning it has for so many of us. And ultimately, Yesterday very clearly says that if you took the Beatles away, nothing would be different and no one would even notice.
Bummer, what a wasted opportunity. Take away the Beatles and the entire musical landscape would be very different — we wouldn’t have the same musicians today, or at least they’d sound significantly different, having grown up with different influences. Ed Sheeran has cited the Beatles as a major influence, so it doesn’t make sense for him to appear in this film AS HIMSELF, with exactly the same songs and career; it would have been more interesting to have major musicians cameo as themselves but leading significantly different lives, maybe not even as musicians at all.
Not only would the music landscape be different, but so would the entire culture. What would the hippie movement and the Summer of Love have looked like without the Beatles? What would fandom be like? What would fashion look like without their early “long” hair? Would there be music videos? British humor was hugely impacted by their irreverence — would we have a Monty Python without the Beatles (and if not, what changes would *their* absence have caused)?
All of this is so much more intriguing than what the movie gives us.
I like to imagine a world in which Neal Stephenson and Helen DeWitt and Alan Moore and Grant Morrison and Mighty God King (http://mightygodking.com/2009/11/10/scenes-from-an-alternate-universe-where-the-beatles-accepted-lorne-michaels-generous-offer/) and Dan Bern (https://youtu.be/l3N9U88N-pk) all get so frustrated with the movie that they write their own versions of the story.
I really have to learn to do hyperlinks.
Here’s the working link to the Mighty God King story. It’s still one of my favorites. In fact, why isn’t THIS a movie?!
http://mightygodking.com/2009/11/10/scenes-from-an-alternate-universe-where-the-beatles-accepted-lorne-michaels-generous-offer/
Even the obvious hacky approach, where everything is Lawrence Welk and Pat Boone, would be more interesting than just ignoring the question!
(Of course we all know rock and roll existed before the Beatles with pioneers like Bill Haley, Marty McFly, and the Thamesmen. )
I don’t know what the real differences would be, but I’d like to see a movie written by someone with good speculative fiction chops take a stab at it!
Another alternative take might be the hero introduces the songs… and gets no particular reaction because the Beatles were all about their specific time and place.
You paint such a clearly correct picture but obvious problem: That would require thinking, researching, and having opinions you will risk putting on screen beyond “The Beatles are a really good band.”
That’s true, but the premise is so original, and so completely nuts, that it’s a little surprising they weren’t brave enough to explore it in more innovative ways. Maybe they thought that audiences would only stick with the concept if it was attached to a really conventional storyline. I wish someone had said, “Does the name Charlie Kaufman mean anything to you?” I guess the Beatles catalog was such an obvious draw that they were only willing to rock the boat a tiny bit.
Actually, it turns out it’s not. In the last few days I’ve heard about two Japanese comics from 2011 with a similar premise, in which musicians go back in time to before the Beatles and “write” their songs. (This is one of them.) A 1990s BBC sitcom, Goodnight Sweetheart, uses the same idea of a time-traveling faux Beatle.
Not precisely the same concept, of course, but close enough. And yet different enough that it warrants real exploration, because it removes the Beatles from their time and plants their music in our own, which those other stories don’t do. That sort of makes it even more necessary that this version of the idea do more with it.
i just heard a story on NPR today about an australian writer with almost the exact same story only his was about an astronaut who went through a wormhole and in an alternate universe where culture and language was almost the same but no Beatles; also about the guy who wrote and filmed “The Space Between Us” and felt that “The Shape of Water” was the same story but felt he couldn’t sue because the timing was too close…. ideas in the zeitgeist but not all are executed the same…
Exactly. Some ideas do honestly and legitimately recur over and over. It doesn’t mean anyone is stealing.
I wouldn’t mind a world without Ed Sheerans music. hahaha
Me either. But we also wouldn’t have the Rutles (speaking of the Monty Python connection)!
We also wouldn’t have Nirvana or KISS or Billy Joel or the Beach Boys or Joni Mitchell or Bruce Springsteen or a bunch of others, who were either inspired to be musicians by the Beatles or were already musicians but evolved in response to what they were hearing from the Beatles.
https://www.rockcellarmagazine.com/top-11-musicians-influenced-by-the-beatles-50th-anniversary/
There’s probably also a long conversation to be had about the Beatles’ relationship to black music, and it would be interesting to speculate on how it would have developed and been marketed/received differently in their absence.
Indeed. Considering how much the Beatles themselves borrowed from black musicians — and not just the obvious cover versions of Chuck Berry and Barrett Strong songs — there is a really really long conversation to be had about the Beatles’ relationship to black music that isn’t likely to be held. (In short, it would help to recognize that the relationship between the Beatles and black music goes both ways.)
Of course, there is a more cynical way to put that but I would rather save that argument for another day.
Sure, and I never meant to imply otherwise. And as I said, it’s a long conversation (which some folks ARE having, here and here and here for starters).
Great links in that post, Bluejay.
I’m so tired of critics whose take on that musical era seems to consist of simplistic comments like “Elvis bad, Beatles good” that it’s good to see that not everyone thinks that way.
To be fair, those articles aren’t saying “Beatles bad” either. :-) They did fully credit the black musicians that they admired and covered. But it is indeed worth thinking about the good AND bad outcomes when the biggest (white) band in the world uses material from marginalized musicians, and that’s a complicated web to untangle.
I did not mean to imply that equally simplistic comments saying “Beatles bad” were a good thing.If that’s the impression you got, my bad.
And speaking of good AND bad outcomes, here’s a topic that’s even less likely to come up for discussion in movies like this: the Beatles’ impact on American drug culture. Surely you don’t have to be to the right of the Church Lady to acknowledge that they had one.
There’s an even darker topic than that that can be discussed but the drug culture topic will suffice for now.
After all, I play Commander Vimes to your Captain Carrot quite enough as it is. (That’s supposed to be a compliment, by the way.)
I like the Church Lady for her influence on vegetarian cuisine. She was always suggesting that something could be seitan.
These people would still exist, and many of them would still be musicians, but their music would certainly be different.
Yes, thanks, that’s what I meant.
Although, for younger musicians (and anyone else) born after 1963, all bets are off. I bet a lot of couples met at Beatles shows or bonded over Beatles songs and had babies afterwards; without the Beatles, those exact same relationships may not have happened, so who knows who’d be walking around today.
Another alternative take: what if the electrical event successfully erased the Beatles but forgot to erase the Rutles?
There would be this sudden rediscovery of musical genius of Neil Innes and Eric Idle in their obscure little comedy project that seems to be parodying something that doesn’t exist (very metA!)
The only way I could maybe see it working is if this isn’t an alternate universe but some sort of mass amnesia. The Beatles still existed and had an influence, but then everyone’s memory is erased, and when they try to think back to the sixties they remember a vague mass of British bands but none really stand out.
But it would also have had to be a mass amnesia that somehow erased Wikipedia entries and CDs and albums and Spotify files…
Hey, that fire in the Universal fault that destroyed so many masters…?
So a vault fire that destroys the Beatles masters, along with the timed degradation of Beatles CDs and the corruption of digital files, all part of the plan of an evil Mick Jagger who also mass-neuralyzes everyone via TV airwaves and phone screens… Still more interesting than the actual movie. :-)
Kyle Reese’s handiwork, obviously. Or else Sarah Connor’s. Or the thirteenth doctor’s…
The sequel will be all about a world where everybody does remember Wings.
Okay, that’s funny.
Umm, Maryann? You might want to check that link embedded in the words “Thanos Snap.”
HA! She should keep it. :-)
That’s… weird. But fixed now. Thanks for pointing it out.
I guess that the corporation that owns the music (having done absolutely nothing to make it happen) keeps it too expensive to include more than a few songs.
This concept seems to be contradictory, really. If the world is identical except for missing music, then the music didn’t have much effect, and therefore it’s not all that special and shouldn’t be hugely popular. If the music is hugely popular, then it should have had an effect on the world first time round.
Here’s one of my favourite side effects of the Beatles: EMI made a huge pile of money, and needed to spend it on something. So they asked all their inventors and developers to bring out the various projects they’d wanted to work on, but hadn’t been able to justify funding for. One of them was Godfrey Hounsfield, who’d been trying to convert the mathematics of the Radon transform into a practical piece of hardware – and when he did, that was the first practical CT scanner.
(The direct link is somewhat disputed, but still reasonably plausible.)
Sooo…in your zeal to sneer at white male-centric stories you enthusiastically endorse holding up a non-white as being a hack unequal in talent to the white guys who wrote the songs. You find it a breath of fresh air.
Interesting.
LOL. I don’t think you know what either of those words actually mean. Nor what this phrase means:
Lol – deflection Inigo Montoya style.
Sure, I know what the words mean.
You’re *so* enthusiastic about and focused on the point that you chose that specific text to highlight. Not the far more story descriptive & relevant “it’s just an excuse to tell yet another story about a not very talented guy who enjoys unwarranted success” – nope, what you present as the important-to-MAJ quick-take is that at least it isn’t a white guy!. You don’t say it makes it a better movie, nah – it just placates your permanently locked and loaded resentment.
Michelle Kirkwood says “a non-white British actor headlining a British film…That’s what got me interested in seeing the film.”
Not the story premise but that it’s a brown-skinned guy. *That’s* what drew you to this film.
I’m sure a lot of people would, like me, just accept him as a frustrated singer-songwriter and not fixate on his race. I often bemusedly shake my head at the variety of racism that’s deemed perfectly acceptable by those on the left side of the spectrum. Ya’ll will never call it that of course – it’s Social Justice® – harrumph!
Of the few other reviews I took a look at including by women, none of them mention this point.
Presumably you’d have found it even more gratifying if the lead was a woman character as the hack unequal to the white men….oddly paradoxical to the ire I’m sure you’d feel about that very same premise in a different context.
Did it rub you the wrong way that Ed Sheeran was played by a white guy named Ed Sheeran?
I see that the actually labeled “quick take” is the angle about unwarranted success, however the notion you chose as important to highlight is the “at least it’s not a white guy” comment.
You literally don’t understand the concept of the parenthetical.
That’s not a question.
You literally don’t understand the concept of the parenthetical.
It has something to do with, let’s see, um – ellipses. No, quotations. Um, no, that little pointy thing over the 8 on the keyboard. Uh, ampersands? Wait I know – umlauts! No? Hey, I know – parentheses!
It’s *literally* a parenthetical in my review.
You’re confusing me with another woman that you actual quote right here.
Again, you either do not know what words mean, or you are deliberately choosing to use them in ways that do not apply to my review.
Maybe examine your anger toward women and nonwhite men.
And then fuck the fuck off.
No confusion, an editorial misstep which I didn’t notice until after I hit the go button – I should have said “her” not “you”. But you clearly share similar sensibilities.
It’s *literally* a parenthetical in my review.
Uh, yeah (??) which is the reason I pointed it out, pretty much the focus of my previous commentary. Stating it once wasn’t enough, you highlighted that specific text from your review to emphasize its importance to you.
Maybe examine your anger toward women and nonwhite men.
Lol – more deflection with a side of denial. Nothing to do with any anger toward women or non-white anyone – the character could have been a black woman and it wouldn’t have registered on my radar as something to care about. I don’t see that it would make any particular difference to this story. I underlined that you made a point of the lead’s race and that you unambiguously state that you’re pleased that he isn’t white. Not for reasons of story, just because you find it gratifying in of itself. Couldn’t have anything to do with oh, say, resentment (anger even) on your part could it? Again, an element I haven’t found mentioned in a random sampling of other reviews I’ve looked at.
You are exasperating! I mentioned the color of the protagonist’s skin ONCE in the review. In a parenthetical. An aside.
You clearly have no idea what words mean. And I don’t give the tiniest fuck what other critics have or have not said. I am done with you.
I mentioned the color of the protagonist’s skin ONCE in the review. In a parenthetical. An aside.
I count twice – don’t think I could have been any clearer as to what I was referring to. Once in the text in parentheses and then highlighted for emphasis on the side – same text, two appearances. Hopefully this image code works here, if not here’s a link.
I am done with you
Baby no! I can change – I swear! I…I can be less white! I know I can! (White and Asian to be more precise)
:)
*grits teeth*
That’s. The. Same. Mention.
It’s the same point. It’s not what drew me to the film. I’m not enthusiastic about it. Phrases like “small favors” and “at least” should indicate how tiny a thing this is.
Now please fuck the fuck off. I am done teaching you how to read.
That’s. The. Same. Mention
Would you agree that you repeated that specific text? Is it reasonable to conclude that you picked that specific text from your review to put by itself in red and in a larger size to emphasize it?
It’s a pull quote. It’s not there to sum up the main point of the review. It’s there to entice people to read the article. It wasn’t chosen because it because it encapsulates MaryAnn’s strongest beliefs. It was chosen because it’s funny or surprising or thought-provoking enough to get your attention. And, in this case, it clearly worked.
The quotation also makes an important point: Representation of minorities in Hollywood is so awful that even a badly-written role in a badly-written movie counts as progress. That doesn’t mean that we should all go out and see a badly-written movie. In fact, MaryAnn told people to avoid it. But she does want us to remember how much progress is still needed. And that point, even when it’s just a brief aside, is worth making in large, red letters.
Give it up.
?????
No, what she meant was that it was refreshing to see a non-white British actor headlining a British film for a change—which is normally not the case. That’s what got me interested in seeing the film.
I wrote my Letterboxd review without reading yours (we even gave it the same star rating!) and my questions about the societal and cultural impact of the Beatles is still the same.
But the other questions I wanted answers to were more “how?” type questions.
How does no one else remember the Beatles except for those two other people? Does getting hit by a bus have anything at all to do with it? What is the connection between Coke, cigarettes, Harry Potter, and all the other things that the world has forgotten?
I would love an entire movie about these questions, and we didn’t get that. But worse, the movie completely ignores them. I enjoy fantasy in movies, but not when the writers go out of their way to avoid making it make sense.
I think we’ve both thought a lot more about this alt-world than the movie does.
At first I thought, with the disappearance of Oasis, they were at least giving the tiniest of nods to what would happen in a world without the Beatles’ influence. And I wondered if there was some connection between the Beatles and Coca Cola I’d been unaware of. But nah, it’s random.
I wholeheartedly agree with this review. This was a crappy rom com when it could have been something special along the lines of Being John Malkovich.
There were tiny moments of redemption like making Here Comes The Sun a ukulele tune and the kids singing O Bla Di O Bla Da at the end.
The highlight of this movie is the closing credits.
IMBd viewer reviews are gushingly positive but surely no self respecting Beatles aficionado or movie buff could respect this piece of fluff.
The kids singing at the end is brilliant. It has an energy the rest of the movie lacks, and a genuine love and appreciation for the Beatles that the rest of the movie wishes it had.
After seeing the movie last night, I suspect that end sequence is the real reason the movie got so many positive viewer reviews on IMDb.
It really was the best part of the movie and I suspect many viewers were willing to forgive the movie for its various shortcomings because of that one sequence.
As it was, the movie makes a better rom-com than an alternative history story.
And speaking of alternative history, the fact that the protagonist is in a world in which cigarettes don’t exist barely gets a mention from any critic? Way to bury the lede.
I can’t help but wonder what Richard Curtis’ old writing partner Ben Elton — author of one of the better alt history novels in recent years (Time and Time Again) — would have done with that premise…
And it’s not that great a rom-com, either. :-(
I suspect that many of my fellow critics didn’t want to spoil the movie much. That’s why I didn’t mention any of the other changes in this alt-world, either. And, par for the course, none of those other changes seem to have had the slightest impact, either.
Going in, I was able to sort of pre-suspend disbelief about an alternate non-Beatles world that looked musically and culturally about the same as ours. The magical thingy took the Beatles away and somehow left their influences intact. *waves hands* … It was that or not bother to see the movie at all, y’know?
But. There were certain things I couldn’t hand-wave away.
MaryAnn mentioned the first one. If John, Paul, George, and Ringo had been born in 1991, they wouldn’t have written “Help” or “I Want to Hold Your Hand” or any number of their earlier hits. And if they had, nobody would’ve listened.
Another musical thing: The Beatles didn’t become an international sensation simply because they wrote great music and lyrics. They had a ton of practice performing in front of people, and they knew how to work a crowd. They had fantastic harmonies. They had great producers. One moderately talented and enthusiastic dude accompanying himself on his guitar was not going to be able to replicate all of that.
(At least they did address the fact that it would be rather difficult to remember all of those lyrics correctly. Points for that.)
And the worst thing, which has nothing to do with music. Spoiler that anyone could figure out if they’ve ever seen a movie:
If Ellie had been in love with Jack since they were 17, and Jack had been in love with Ellie the entire time too, they would’ve figured it out long before now. There was literally no reason they shouldn’t have been together at the start of the movie. The writers could’ve easily made it more plausible by having one of them be in a long-term relationship for most of that time. They never thought much about their obvious chemistry because actual reasons. It took me five seconds to come up with that and I’ve never been to film school.
Corollary: When the person you’ve been in love with since you were seventeen declares her love for you, you say, “Holy shit! I love you too!” You don’t run out of the room without giving any kind of answer because some people have interrupted you.
It wasn’t terrible. I enjoyed a lot of it. It just could’ve been so much better.
(Oh, and FWIW, I liked Ed Sheeran’s little penguin song a lot better than “The Long and Winding Road.”)
Excellent point.