Movie Review: Peace and Love for Beatles Rom-Com "Yesterday"

It takes some rad songs and makes them… well, not better, but not worse either.

When I mentioned to my mum that I was seeing Yesterday, a movie in which our entire world forgets The Beatles were ever thing, I heard genuine, heart-struck sadness at the other end of the phone. "A world without The Beatles sounds terrible," she expressed earnestly. I had never heard anyone respond like that to other post-apocalyptic premises. From this small sample, you could extrapolate that we’d all rather live in the kill-or-be-killed districts of The Hunger Games or the baby-eating express train in Snowpiercer than not hear "Yellow Submarine" again.

Danny Boyle, who knows plenty about global worst-case scenarios thanks to Sunshine and 28 Days Later, is Yesterday’s director, but he’s working with softer material than usual, courtesy of screenwriter Richard Curtis (Love Actually, Notting Hill). Usually Boyle operates in fast-forward, while Curtis prefers to hit pause and let things go on too long. Turns out this duet suits both acts.

In their sunnily dystopic vision, flailing singer-songwriter Jack Malik (Himesh Patel) becomes the last man on Earth to remember the music of The Beatles when he’s struck by a bus during a global black-out. After waking from his coma, he learns no one else has heard of John, Paul, George or Ringo. He discovers this while singing "Yesterday" to his loyal, pining manager Ellie (Lily James) on a new guitar. A gobsmacked Ellie assumes he wrote it, hoping, additionally, that he wrote it for her.

Despite losing the recorded works of The Beatles, which have been at the center of our pop culture universe for seven decades, little else differs in this accidental parallel dimension. As Jack frantically Googles on his first night in the new reality, the Rolling Stones and most other artists still exist, except for one band, which was presumably erased from history seeing as there weren’t any Beatles songs for them to rip off. (I’ll give you three guesses. You’ll only need one.) Besides the Stones, the other big winner is Pepsi, seeing as Coca-Cola has been lost to the sands of time. It’s the biggest case of wish-fulfilling product placement since Peter Parker prominently used 'Bing' in The Amazing Spider-Man.

You have to wonder: What if an artist released all this great music for the first time in 2019? Would it be embraced, or left to languish? Jack faces that very dilemma here, wrestling with the responsibility of re-introducing the world to lost works and taking the credit for creating them (if only he could remember the lyrics to "Eleanor Rigby"). Ultimately though, Curtis is more interested in the romance of it all, and Yesterday turns into a typical rom-com in which a character must choose either fame and glory or a modest life of love. Helpfully, Patel is as capable as an indecisive romantic lead as he is a vessel for The Beatles’ music, while James is so funny and winning as the school-teacher-turned-manager who just wants all his loving.

The pleasant-seeming Ed Sheeran is in this too, and though he doesn’t meet the same grisly fate as his minor character in Game of Thrones, he brings his acting career to a violent end with his flat performance as… himself. Much better as comic relief is Joel Fry, playing Jack’s roadie, Rocky (oh, I just got that—cute). He cheerfully tells Ed to leave rap "to the brothers". Funny and accurate!

Unfortunately, despite a swift start, Curtis’ screenplay drags to the two-hour mark, as is usually the case with his flicks. Boyle is also guilty of unnecessarily indulging his flashier side, when all it does is distract (such as one inexplicable moment in which he tracks a walk-and-talk through festival grounds at a 45-degree angle). But it’s hard not to otherwise enjoy a film that basically plays you The Beatles' songs for two hours, especially Patel’s raucous renditions of "I Saw Her Standing There" and "Help". The movie’s thesis is inarguable: The Beatles wrote some great tunes, y’know?

3.5/5

In Australian cinemas 27 June. Rated M for coarse language.