I Like To Watch | Yesterday (2019)
As a kid, I grew up listening to the music of my young mother. Jim Croce, Elvis Presley, Janice Joplin, Bob Marley, James Taylor. Sometime around my sixth year, I discovered The Beatles and I was hooked for life.
I loved the music of the Fab Four so much that by the time I was a fledgeling middle school music teacher, I taught a nine-week course to my eighth graders on their music for ten years. The premise of the class was that the songs of John and Paul were the classical music of the Twentieth Century. That centuries after we’re long dead, people will still be listening to their extraordinary canon.
Mom loved them in their early phase but felt, at the time, that their psychedelic stuff around Magical Mystery Tour was too esoteric, too alienating. She felt like the band was making fun of her in some way. I, on the other hand, dove right in and listened to every album, every outtake, every alternative version I could lay my hands on.
While I moved on to jazz, punk rock in the eighties, metal in the nineties, and an affinity to the glam rock of my coming of age, The Beatles were never far behind. Like Kind of Blue or A Love Supreme, Abbey Road was always in the rotation of music that had to be absorbed and shared. For every Bowie song, every Rollins Band screed, A Day in the Life was the next track on the mixtape of my days.
In 2002, the theater I ran was in a place of almost relentless creativity. We had a theater and seven nights a week to fill so we did everything we could dream onstage. I conceived of a show inspired by McCartney’s Eleanor Rigby that explored seven of the loneliest people we could create finding connection with each other. It was entirely silent and underscored by music written by our composer-in-residence Jeff Shivar. We called it Crosscurrents.
The first act was seeing each of the seven alone in their element of despair. Fumbling through their lives, darning the socks no one would wear. The second saw them in collective spaces (like a laundromat or a coffee shop) clumsily intersecting and failing to find any sort of communal purchase. The third act found them finding someone with the seventh finally going out into the house and “finding” an audience member with which to bond.
The music, all inspired by Beatles’ songs, was haunting and beautiful. If you listened closely enough, you could hear the specific influences. It was a unifying element to the individual humanity, binding actor, character and audience together in a way that language could not. Shivar understood the power of that element and was such an incredible musician that he allowed his own composition to reflect the genius of those Liverpoolians while still building his own 75-minutes of sound.
In 2007, the brilliant Julie Taymor created Across the Universe, a juke box musical using the songs of The Beatles to mixed reception. I, however, love every second of it and can watch it repeatedly. It’s not the storyline or even Taymor’s spectacular visual flair — it’s the music.
When Danny Boyle and Richard Curtis concocted and released Yesterday this year, I knew instantly I wanted to see it but something stopped me. I’m not entirely sure why I wasn’t in the theater opening weekend but my guess is that having just moved to Las Vegas, I was perhaps a bit pre-occupied. Whatever the reason, I finally sat down and took in their story of a world absent of any knowledge of The Beatles or their music save a single singer/songwriter.
Played out as some sort of cosmic What If...?, Yesterday begins with Jack Malik (Himesh Patel), a singer/songwriter on the tail end of youthful ambition to be a great rockstar to no success. One night, as he is riding his bike home at night, the lights go out across the globe for twelve seconds and Jack is hit by a bus. When he wakes up, no one has ever heard of The Beatles or their music. He decides to cull together his best memory of every song he could and pass them off as his own and realizes that it is not he but the songs that catapult him to worldwide stardom.
As any good story that features this music, Yesterday is also a love story. Jack’s long time friend and manager, Ellie (Lily James), is in his friend zone but is hopelessly in love with him. He is so focused on his thwarted career followed by his ascendence to stardom, he is oblivious. Along for the ride is Ed Sheeran playing himself and Kate McKinnon as the soulless new manager with the mouth of Bea Arthur.
Patel has a great voice and the interpretations of the music are spot on and lovely. The love story is cute. One mystery within the narrative is that Jack is not the only person on the planet who remembers the Beatles. Exactly two others do as well. Once he is confronted, their reaction is so surprisingly sweet and reveals a moment in the film that had me weeping for joy.
At the end, however, it is all about the songs. And, oh, what extraordinary songs they are.
