Tunes and Cinematography Share the Honours

Rating: 6/10 (30 June 2019)

Despite pre-release Australian reviews for Danny Boyle's Yesterday being decidedly underwhelming, it had a full house at the large theatre at which I saw it on a Sunday afternoon. Apart from a few young shavers, In my fifties, I was at the youthful end of the watching demographic - there were several blue-rinses.
Yesterday tells of The Beatles becoming wiped from history after a 12-second world power outage. A young and unsuccessful songwriter from a sleepy English seaside town, Jack Malik (Himesh Patel), is seemingly the only person now alive who knows of the band and their catalogue, having received a concussion at the precise moment of the power cut. After realising he's not victim to a large scale meta joke, that The Beatles really have been expunged from memory in this parallel universe, he starts 'composing' their songs, ultimately to be lauded as the world's greatest songwriter. But does it bring him happiness and love?
The idea is great, the execution less so.
Screenplay is from Richard Curtis who seems to have been on auto-pilot during its writing. His CV in the last 30 years is beyond impressive, but we all have off days. Its well-worn and simple premise of guilt and unacknowledged love ran very shallow, its jokes often laboured.
And too many of the support characters are plain annoying and irritating rather than endearing; sadly, the usually marvellous Sanjeev Bhaskar as Jack's Dad is the chief culprit in this regard. An extended support performance from Ed Sheeran stretched his limited acting experience beyond credibility.
Likewise, in his first big screen outing, Himesh Patel as the film's star had difficulty imposing himself. His delivery of the Lennon-McCartney and Harrison songs was, however, generally impressive, a lack of tone only occasionally showing.
Cinematography from Christopher Ross was first rate, the concert footage especially so. The mainly English locations showed that country in a good light - including a brief montage of Liverpool's exceptional civic architecture.
The film is inoffensive, the soundtrack exceptional (does that need saying?), but ultimately extremely lightweight. But it's always going to be worth seeing for the tunes.