Movie Review: Yesterday | A feel good rom-com

Johnson Thomas

Academy Award winning director Danny Boyle (of Slumdog Millionaire fame) and Oscar-nominated screenwriter Richard Curtis (of Four Weddings and a Funeral fame) come together to bring out a romcom that has rock-n-roll music, dreams, friendship, and love to draw on. This film features new versions of The Beatles’ most beloved hits while deriving from a hallucinatory construct that presupposes that they don’t exist.

For those who have loved The Beatles, this might not be amusing but it’s a rather harmless epiphany that rights itself before it can run out of ideas. When Jack Malik (Himesh Patel) a struggling singer-songwriter from a tiny English seaside town wakes up from a worldwide power outage followed by an accident, the people around him seem to have forgotten something. He talks to them about The Beatles but everyone including his childhood best friend cum manager Ellie (Lily James) doesn’t remember The Beatles. They actually think that no such band exists. So with a veritable goldmine of music at his disposal Jack goes ahead and performs – to the delight of music executives who see talent in his songwriting skills. 

Ed Sheeran takes him to Moscow on his tour and the crowd goes wild, turning him into a social media phenomenon. And just when he is putting together songs like Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, and Eleanor Rigby for The White Album he gets opposition from the music executive think-tank who suggest he might be overreaching by having a moniker that could garner criticism for its racist leanings and a song title that would be too much of a mouthful for today’s ‘instant’ generation. 

The dialogues make for such subtle digs at the millennials that it’s not exactly laugh-out-loud humour but wryly ironic. Yesterday fails to develop its conceit beyond a point. In a world without The Beatles, everyone else in the pop culture hall of fame exists – so that’s a bit difficult to stomach. There’s not much idea either about how the world would have changed without The Beatles in it. The narrative prefers to turn it into a hard-won romance, running with clichés and made impossible by stereotypical hurdles. This is the kind of blinkered imagination we associate with under-developed scripting. But Boyle’s vaunted story-telling style, which also includes a stop and start music video sequence, and Curtis’ sly humour, more than make up for the ‘unrealised potential’ here.

Kate McKinnon as Debra, the music agent intent on transforming a defective talent into a would-be pop icon, has the funniest lines and the dead-pan demeanor to go with it. Lily James is pretty and believable as the love interest tirelessly slogging behind the scenes to make Jack’s dream come true. And Patel himself, though not much of a singer (other than his version of Help), draws on his ‘Eastenders’ experience to present a vulnerability that will pull you onto his side. This may not be thought-provoking cinema but it is certainly a feel-good, fairly dramatic and delightful entertainer!