Shaggy Treatment of Mop-Top Music

Rating: 6/10 (11 July 2019)

The good:
1. Lily James plays Ellie. I loved her spicy Cousin Rose in Downton Abbey and her spunky good ol' girl waitress in Baby Driver. She has become a young actress I look forward to seeing. She gives an appealing performance as an underappreciated woman. But pray tell, why does the lead character, Jack, underappreciate her for so many years (besides being a sad sack)?
2. The Beatles music is fun to hear, even though not performed (mostly) by the Beatles. The music playing over the closing credits is perfect.
3. Toward the end there is a charming scene set at a slightly dilapidated house near the water. To say more would be to say too much.
4. Funny character work by Kate McKinnon, who has the best comic eyes since John Belushi. But see the quibble below.
5. Ed Sheeran shuffles through the movie playing himself. He is amiable and self-deprecating and likeable.
6. The use of Google searches is amusing. (Some of us pray to God for guidance, but we all get answers from Google.)
My quibbles:
1. Himesh Patel, who plays Jack, isn't a great singer. He misses notes.In a movie about an aspiring musician getting famous singing Beatles songs, shouldn't the actor be able to do them justice. (I assume he sang for himself. Where is Marni Nixon when you really need her? Or Auto-Tune?)
2. The film raises some serious issues-happiness and art and conscience and the corrupting influence of fame and money-but falls flat. There's no emotional heft in the climactic moment of crisis and redemption.
3. Dental problems. For a time, the lead actor wears an off-putting dental prosthesis. It's both gross and obviously fake. How does that improve the movie?
4. Beatles music remains popular, but the band and the music and the innovation are inseparable from the cultural context of the 1960s. If The Beatles came along now, would they even get played on the radio? Music which felt fresh and innovative and a little dangerous in 1967 has become foundational to much of popular music today. Indeed, if a classic Beatles tune were released for the first time today, it might seem a bit old-fashioned. The movie simply assumes that songs written in the mid-1960s would have instant astonishing immediate popularity 65 year later. But would they? A question worth pondering. The movie, however, doesn't give it a second thought.
5. The worldwide blackout that destroys almost all memory of The Beatles is never explained, It's as if the filmmaker is saying: Move on, moviegoer, nothing to explain here. But that means the blackout is a deus ex machina of the most shamelessly contrived sort.
6. In one scene, Jack is overjoyed to meet an older man and woman-never mind why. But then he lets them leave without even getting their phone numbers. Did I miss something? Wouldn't he be desperate to see them again? They are, so far as he knows, the only two people in the world who understand him and to whom he can talk.
7. Kate McKinnon is funny, but it's a stock character, the fast-talking overbearing anything-for-a buck soul-deadening leach of a manager. She could have been the film's villain, which it needed, but she never moves the character past comic caricature. She succeeds at comedy but fails at villainy.
8. The big climax leaves behind questions for the world to ponder that can't be answered. I can't say more. But how do those massive unanswered questions affect Jack's life? The final scene doesn't logically follow or resolve the huge questions, and so leaves us hanging.
If you want a lightweight movie with Beatles music, a movie that doesn't place demands on its audience or itself, and you don't mind shaggy logic and loose plotting and maddening loose ends, give it a try. You could do worse. It's hot out there, and the theater is air conditioned.