Review: Yesterday

What if you woke up one day and you were the only one who knew that The Beatles ever existed? What would life be like? How would the past several decades have been affected? Yesterday, the rom-com disguised as a musical fairy tale written by Richard Curtis and directed by Danny Boyle, offers a few answers such as Oasis never coming into being (though Coldplay avoids this fate), but never truly leans in to the cleverness and intrigue of its premise.

Jack Malik (Himesh Patel) is a struggling singer-songwriter who seems destined to be a nobody despite the best efforts and unwavering enthusiasm of his childhood friend Ellie (Lily James). "Miracles happen," she tells him when he resolves to give up on his dream. Indeed, an unlikely miracle manifests in the form of a 12-second global power outage during which time Jack, biking home to his parents, is hit by a bus and knocked unconscious. When he awakens, the world has changed, The Beatles are no more, and he is beyond flummoxed as to why he alone remembers their music.

When Ellie and his small circle of friends remark upon his rendition of the Fab Four's classic, "Yesterday," it plants a seed in Jack's head. What if he passed off The Beatles' songs as his own? Sure enough, Jack begins to find success, attracting the attention of Ed Sheeran (gamely and entertainingly playing himself), who invites him to be his opening act, and music agent Debra (Kate McKinnon), who promises him money and fame provided he let her remake his image. McKinnon is as zingy as ever, embodying Debra as an unapologetic figure, matter-of-factly stating, "I know nothing about his life because he's a product to me."

Fun and sentimentality are two of Curtis' hallmarks and Yesterday certainly bears those in spades, but it is somewhat surprising how Curtis completely subsumes and obliterates Boyle's jaggedness. Yesterday bends very much to Curtis' will and it suffers for it. Jack's trajectory is less about an artist being forced to confront the depths of his ambition and integrity, but rather about winning the girl. Perhaps this wouldn't be so much of an irritant if Ellie as a character and the relationship between Jack and Ellie were more fully realised. Patel and James are both winsome performers but, as a pair, they're more believable as friends rather than romantic lovers.

For all its intermittent charms, there's a nagging sense of what Yesterday could have been had Curtis done more with this idea. Apart from how history and culture would have differed, how would The Beatles and their songs fare in today's more cynical and superficial world? Would their songs be as embraced by a world who only accepts sincerity when it's laced with snark or irony? Would their songs be even thought of as good? Unfortunately, all we're left with are the questions.

Yesterday

Directed by: Danny Boyle

Written by: Richard Curtis

Starring: Himesh Patel, Lily James, Kate McKinnon, Ed Sheeran, Lamorne Morris, James Corden, Robert Carlyle