Directrospective: YESTERDAY (2019)

Notes on the films of English director and central Smurfs antagonist Danny Boyle.

Lackluster musician Jack Malik (Himesh Patel) watches his fraud go viral in YESTERDAY’s only Boylesque sequence.

Our Danny Boyle Directrospective comes to a close today, and an ignominious close it is. Even if T2 TRAINSPOTTING would have been a dreary to end on, it would have been dreary on purpose. Boyle’s 2019 Beatles what-if rom-com is anything but purposeful; more than any other film in Boyle’s career, it’s unimaginative, uninspired, and, worst of all, boring.

After an exciting few months in 2018 where Boyle and screenwriter John Hodge had signed on to the make the next and presumably last James Bond film with Daniel Craig - a tedious, retrograde franchise that should definitely no longer exist, but, if it must, would only benefit from some left-field Boyle antics - things fell apart and they left the project. Boyle then announced he was working on a musical project with FOUR WEDDINGS AND A FUNERAL screenwriter and LOVE ACTUALLY perpetrator Richard Curtis. Curtis, who specializes in light, cute romantic comedy fare, was working from a script by Jack Barth that had been bouncing around for over half a decade.

Barth (who gets a co-Story By credit with Curtis, the only credited screenwriter) says his spec script was about an unsuccessful songwriter who miraculously finds himself in a position to record the Beatles catalog for the first time, only to remain just as ignored despite having “original” material that he knows was hugely popular in someone else’s hands. This is a strong, funny premise clearly based on the writer’s real experience of rejection and struggle, and one that Barth says Curtis abandoned after the first act or so, probably because, as an Oxford man who rode Rowan Atkinson’s coattails to success, he can’t relate to the idea of being a struggling writer. I’m inclined to believe Barth.

The story begins with Jack Malik, played by the charming enough Himesh Patel and whose surname is likely a weird nod to the lead character of SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE, a perfectly fine singer and unremarkable songwriter, thinking about giving up on his stalled music career. His manager who is also in love with him, Ellie (Lily James), thinks he has something special, even if she’s the only one. After a bike accident concurrent with a global power surge, Jack realizes that he’s the only person in the world who remembers the music of The Beatles. Smelling an opportunity, he puts aside his moral misgivings and starts to perform all the Beatles songs he can remember (Boyle and Curtis try to have this both ways, with Jack remembering a remarkable number of entire arrangements so that he can get famous while being a casual enough Beatles fan that he can have a comically hard time remembering the lyrics to “Eleanor Rigby,” for example.) At first, nobody gives a shit and it’s pretty funny. One of his friends thinks “Yesterday” is a lovely enough song, but it’s not like it’s on the same level as Coldplay. Sitting down at the piano to blow his parents’ minds with “Let It Be,” they can’t stop interrupting him long enough to hear it. Many artists’ worst fear is confirmed for Jack in a way that’s brutally clear: it isn’t just his material that people don’t like, it’s him. Then there’s an abrupt, totally unmotivated turn that feels like it must be the point where Barth’s movie ends and Curtis’s begins, as a small-potatoes A&R guy hears Jack in a pub where he’s bombing and wants to record him for some reason.

Now Jack’s on a rocket ship to stardom, selected to open for Ed Sheeran on tour (because Coldplay didn’t want to be in the movie), his recreations of club bangers like “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and “The Long and Winding Road” tearing up the charts worldwide, and apparently nothing to stop him but his own conscience. He gets famous, realizes he messed up with Ellie, she rejects him, he becomes increasingly paranoid that he’ll be revealed as a fraud, and eventually comes clean to the world that he’s playing songs written by other people from another dimension, releasing them for free to the whole world in a grand benevolent gesture. Ellie comes around and they settle down together back in their little hometown where Jack becomes a music teacher. A lovely little happy ending.

Curtis has made a bizarre decision to use this fairly unprecedented access to the Beatles catalog not to make an alternate history movie, but a semi-romantic comedy about plagiarism. With the exception of a few decent jokes (Oasis doesn’t exist in this world either), some very confusing “jokes” (neither do cigarettes or Coca-Cola?), and a truly off-the-rails sequence in which Jack goes to see this reality’s John Lennon (an eerily convincing made-up Robert Carlyle), who is not a musician but seems to be living out a nice life contentedly unassassinated, this could easily be a story about a musician who has a hit song with something he ripped off from a guy on YouTube and feels bad about it. There’s no excuse to squander such a ripe hook for a movie unless Curtis wanted to do his usual rom-com trifle thing without having to think too hard. It’s all I could think about, though. If the nonexistence of The Beatles precludes the existence of Oasis, what about Big Star? Without them, what about The Replacements? Without them, what about the movie CAN’T HARDLY WAIT? What about NOT ANOTHER TEEN MOVIE? Would Chris Evans have the same career? Would he have been in SUNSHINE? To say nothing of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and all it has wrought throughout the entertainment world. Let’s start again. Without The Beatles, would the Rolling Stones have been as popular? Would Keith Richards have been able to play the guitar on the 1985 Tom Waits record Rain Dogs? Without Rain Dogs, would Waits’s career have fizzled? Without Tom Waits involved in its redevelopment, would Sunset Strip jazz club The Central have been converted into The Viper Room? If the Viper Room wasn’t there, would River Phoenix have overdosed and died on the sidewalk outside? If River Phoenix hadn’t overdosed, would his brother Joaquin have been as hesitant to take the role of Dirk Diggler in BOOGIE NIGHTS a few year later? If Joaquin Phoenix starred in BOOGIE NIGHTS, would Mark Wahlberg have had the same career? Might his plans not have changed on September 10, 2001? Would he have boarded American Airlines Flight 11 from Boston to Los Angeles the following morning? When Mohamed Atta seized control of the plane and steered it toward the North Tower of the World Trade Center, would, as Wahlberg has suggested, things “have went down like [they] did”? Having thwarted one-fourth of the 9/11 hijackings, would Mark Wahlberg have successfully run for President in 2004? If Mark Wahlberg had been elected President, would it now be illegal in the United States to be a Vietnamese person? The film has a lot of questions to answer, and Curtis abdicates his duty entirely.

This all ignores, as the film does, the ludicrous assumption that a whole swath of white Little Richard knockoffs and sitar LSD freakouts and music hall piano ditties about hammer-murdering medical students would mean anything to anyone in 2019, or that the music industry would look anything like it does had Beatlemania not happened when it did. I don’t necessarily think these songs are powerful enough to change humanity, as the movie seems to, but the very real cultural effects of the whole advertising and merchandising machine that popped up around the band are undeniable. Curtis isn’t interested.

So having chosen neither to pursue the butterfly effect implications of a Beatles-less world nor to examine the emotional effect of having even “Hey Jude” rejected by the music industry when it comes out of your mouth, he gives us a bland and actively uninteresting romantic plot involving Patel and James, both of whom are perfectly good-looking people who could seem less excited to be here. Boyle feels entirely absent from the equation. Had his name not appeared in the credits, I don’t know that I could have guessed he directed the film, and the same couldn’t be said of any of his other films except maybe STEVE JOBS. For the first time on a feature film, Boyle’s cinematographer is Christopher Ross, primarily a television D.P. who had shot the three Boyle-directed episodes of the FX Getty kidnapping series Trust. This makes sense, because YESTERDAY has all the panache and chiaroscuro dynamism of an episode of Modern Family.

It’s hard to situate this film within Boyle’s body of work for these reasons. It feels anonymously made. Having charted his career over the last week or so on this site, it’s hard to call any of Danny Boyle’s other films boring, besides maybe A LIFE LESS ORDINARY. Another case of a clear premise that goes off in less interesting directions, that film at least has too many weird ideas going on in it to be this unengaging. Jack’s conflict in this film is one of self-interest, as Boyle conflicts always are, but the metaphysical murkiness of his world means that no one is getting the short end of the stick if he pretends he wrote all these songs. He’s no accountant David Stephens or junkie Mark Renton or beach-revealer Richard or Major Henry West or nine-year-old Damian Cunningham or communications officer Harvey or slum child Salim Malik or or Bulgarian would-be-madam Veronika, actively ruining someone else’s life for his own gain. His is a purely internal conflict, more along the lines of Aron Ralston’s or Steve Jobs’s, but we don’t really care about him. He decides to do the right thing, because this is a Danny Boyle movie and otherwise he’d die, but there’s never a sense that he won’t, or that he and Ellie won’t end up together. The rom-com formula is one of the genre’s greatest pleasures, but here it’s tiresome, some business to get through so we can get to the end of the movie. It’s painfully dull.

I’m glad Boyle’s got something else in the works, apparently a potential franchise starter that is sort of but not really based on the biblical Methuselah, starring Michael B. Jordan. Simon Beaufoy is involved in the script. He’s only in his early 60s and doesn’t seem interested in slowing down at all. I’d hate for this to be the movie he goes out on.