Plagiarism Spoils Novelty

Rating: 4/10 (2 November 2019)

"Yesterday" was a promising movie that fails for the same reason its protagonist, Jack Malik, fails as a rock star. Both begin with a relatively original idea, but are increasingly weighed down by pangs over plagiarism. Jack finds himself one day to be the only person who remembers The Beatles and, already being a musician, sets out to pass their songs off as his own. This is an interesting concept that raises many questions more important than character psychology and interaction--almost all of which it doesn't bother to even investigate beyond the fact that Google clearly continues to exist to pay for product placement, as Jack repeatedly employs the search engine to figure out what has changed in the world. Instead, the movie cribs every other rom-com, to suffocate us in cloying infatuation, including retching up yet another climactic grand public display of love. Yeah, I get it, "All You Need Is Love." No thanks, copycats.
There may be something to the connection between popular music and rom-coms, though. Both seem to rely heavily and sometimes exclusively upon simple emotionalism. There's nothing here about the art or craft of either. Jack merely is already a practiced artisan of music and is seen only needing to remember the words and their order to compose the famous songs. Meanwhile, the movie attempts to play all the tired rom-com notes below detection--hoping we'll be too consumed in feelings to care. Listening to The Beatles for a couple hours is pleasant enough, but if there's no art to the movie's record playing, I could do as well without its existence.
In lieu of that, there are character dynamics. I couldn't care less about the love story. I mean, a hero who appears asexual for the first part of the picture and a woman who claims to have waited for a decade or more for a guy to ask her out, with their main conflict being between romance and rock-and-roll fame despite the fact that she was his manager--talk about contrived. Only once does the music even reflect this narrative in any compelling way, when Jack screams, "Help!" Additionally, the music industry is largely reduced to an SNL skit for Kate McKinnon, and the reported brilliance of The Beatles is seemingly rendered unimportant, as they appear to have had little to no effect on pop music, let alone the world. The oddest part is the inclusion here of a celebrity, Ed Sheeran. I'd never heard of him, but he occupies the same space that LeBron James did in another insipid entry in this genre, "Trainwreck" (2015). That is, neither one needed either of them. Moreover, they would've been better without them. Providing an audience the opportunity to think, "oh, yeah, that guy," is not a valid reason for inclusion. In this one, Sheeran references "Amadeus" (1984), but "Yesterday" is chopsticks by comparison.
Even worse, I didn't check before viewing this to notice that it's written by, perhaps, the biggest hack of a screenwriter today in Richard Curtis. "Love Actually" (2003) is a putrid reference point, repetitively so, for every worthless trope in the rom-com book of clichÃ©s, and "About Time" (2013) was another promising variation (it has time travel) on the same genre that failed miserably. Evidently, Curtis has reached the point where he's merely altering the hook (mass amnesia or alternate timelines, time travel, or what have you) in rewriting the same formula. I'm not a fan of Danny Boyle, either, but "Yesterday" may be a bit better than those two because at least Curtis doesn't direct it. Ultimately, it's as though we're left remembering that initial, promising novelty here, which seems to have been forgotten by the rest of the movie in its determination to appropriate the same junk Curtis and his ilk have done over and over again. The spectator can imagine a better movie, one where the loss of The Beatles matters and reverberates. Perhaps, even the dearth of the band's juvenile and unrealistic nonsense depiction of love would affect cinema; then, maybe Nora Ephron would never have wrote a fluffy imitation of Woody Allen comedies, which would further lead to Curtis not turning that fluff into insipidness. Imagine.