“Yesterday” Imagines Life Without Musical Icons

Danny Boyle’s Yesterday: C

Have you ever had that tense dream when you show up for a final exam but missed the entire preceding semester of study? Or you appear on a stage to perform in a play but never memorized the script or blocking? Sure, you can get by with a little help from your friends, but your tour of duty will be dotted with some magical mysteries not easily solved. Even with the witty words of screenwriter Richard Curtis and music and lyrics of none other than The Beatles, Director Danny Boyle’s tonal troubles are here to stay in Yesterday (C-), his fussy maiden voyage into the romantic comedy genre. Sprinkle in a painfully miscast and unfunny Himesh Patel as the lead character, and base it all on a Twilight Zone style premise of “What if only one person on earth knew of the existence and song catalogue of The Beatles, and what if he were a singer who could pass off the tunes as his own?,” and you have a movie director seriously in need of a lot of hand holding. Only a lovely performance by Lily James, who lifts the love interest role into master class territory, keeps the plot grounded amidst Boyle’s kaleidoscopic swirl of perplexing supporting characters, floating fonts and fissures in the space-time continuum. A movie promising the Fab Four’s fanciful fare gets an uncomfortably competing and cloying dose of Ed Sheeran music (the musician plays himself) and very little joy or creativity in the live performances. The lead character is so wound up in guilt about the plagiarized origins of his source material that his music is robbed of its joy. This misbegotten effort is not without its occasional charms. For instance, there was some nice commentary about whether the presence of genius would even be noticed by a society marred by short attention spans. But the smiles and specific song you leave humming at the film’s finale don’t help harvest the fruit of Boyle’s often rotten strawberry field.

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