YESTERDAY
Director Danny Boyle
Cert. 12A 116 mins
Have you heard of The Beatles? Of course you have. Well, the premise of this film is that no one has heard of The Beatles – no one except Jack (Himesh Patel), a down-on-his-luck singer-songwriter who says he’s strummed his final chord. He tells his manager: ‘If it hasn’t happened now, it’ll take a miracle.’
Miracle. That’s an interesting word as it pertains to Yesterday. The whole film hinges on one. Or does it?
I don’t want to spoil the goings-on of the latter half, but the audience is never entirely sure what happens, because Yesterday never seems entirely sure what it wants to be. The premise smacks of science-fiction. There’s a half-hearted rom-com mixed in, and a half-baked panning of the music industry and all its soul-destroying greed.
But these disparate parts don’t fit together, so much so that I couldn’t help but notice a strange lack of commitment to its starting premise. This lack of commitment, only nascent in the film’s first act, becomes glaring by the its end.
I don’t mean to imply I found Yesterday dull and unenjoyable. There’s a brimming brilliance to the conceit, particularly at the beginning. What would it be like to be the first person to hear a masterpiece like ‘Yesterday’? How exactly is this world different? There’s also some hearty laughter, particularly when Jack’s earnest artistry gets constantly halted by unintended interruptions. As is his British wont, Boyle offers quarter to neither the saccharine nor the scathing. Instead, he shrewdly mixes humorous disdain with genuine reverence for both the power of art in general and The Beatles’ work in particular.
Furthermore, Jack is a promising actor. Always wide-eyed and agape, he never seems too comfortable in his duplicitous success. Boyle wisely doesn’t turn Jack into a loathsome shill. We actually like him, we root for him, and we maintain our affections for him. (I would even argue that the rom-com plot leaves him with nothing to apologise for, but I digress.) Boyle also gives us a simultaneously meta and worthy Ed Sheeran performance.
Upon seeing the trailer for Yesterday, I fully expected an extended appreciation of The Beatles – complete with song after song that we follow along in our heads. But I also expected an extended engagement with its premise.
Is it sinful to do what Jack does? If John, Paul, George, and Ringo never existed – or, if they never wrote these songs in this particular universe – then is it really ‘stealing’? If so, who did he steal from? If this ‘theft’ were to be divulged, how would the world respond?
Unfortunately, Yesterday seems uninterested in its more interesting half. The film gives up on the ethical and even existential quandaries it presents, and in its place offers its audience warmed-over soliloquies about how love is more important than fame, and integrity endures longer than gain. That’s a shame, because there’s a version of this film – with a different ending, with a bolder re-conceptualisation of its once-brimming central conceit – that would have done more than simply give an audience an excuse to listen to The Beatles.
