The only thing you've done was yesterday
The trope that domestic life can satisfy hunger for professional success seems implausible
I've no gripe against Richard Curtis. Yes, he churns out schmaltzy, predictable romcoms. But he also wrote Blackadder, the kind of work that justifies a lifetime of artistic forgiveness.
That said, forgiveness does not imply engagement. So when I found out in 2019 that Curtis had written Yesterday, a film about the Beatles’ songs, I didn’t rush to the cinema. My abiding memory was of Lily James nibbling her finger on the poster in that irksome, cutesy fashion.
No thanks, I thought.
But times change, and lockdown has lowered all standards. 25 June is also apparently Global Beatles Day, and no journalist can resist the lure of a largely unnoticed event to justify reviewing a film they watched on a whim after a day at the pub.
Using bands' back catalogues as the basis for other art was common even before Yesterday. Ben Elton, the other writer behind Blackadder, turned Queen hits into a musical with We Will Rock You. Blinded by the Light, which also appeared in 2019, hinged on Bruce Springsteen's songs. Expect more to follow now ageing artists have started selling off their catalogues to big money.
Yesterday is however unusual in being explicitly about someone who makes a career from leveraging the work of another. Jack Malik, a failing singer-songwriter, recovers from a blackout-induced traffic accident to discover that only he can remember the Beatles and their songs. After some hesitancy, he starts to pass the tunes off as his own, to great acclaim.
Although Curtis is solely credited for the screenplay, the man he bought the broad concept off – Jack Barth – claims to have supplied many smaller ideas too. If true the irony is pretty tasty: a plagiarist’s take on plagiarism. More curiously, while Curtis’ story implies the Beatles’ tunes could carry anybody to success, Barth thought the opposite.
“I wrote it from my point of view,” Barth told Uproxx. “I was lying in bed one night thinking if Star Wars hadn’t been made and I just came up with the idea for Star Wars, I bet I wouldn’t be able to sell it. Carry that on to the Beatles: if I knew all the Beatles songs, I bet I couldn’t be successful with it.”
The arc of Curtis’s script is that while protagonist Malik is catapulted into the kind of fame and success many aspire to, he is still left unsatisfied. He ultimately finds fulfilment in the arms of a childhood sweetheart, played by the aforementioned James. This is after a conversation with John Lennon, in this timeline an aged fisherman who claims to have lived a good life.
So far, so Hollywood. Barth’s explanation of the distinction between the two scripts comes down to background. While Curtis’s life has seemingly been an easy ride from Oxford to Hugh Grant via Rowan Atkinson, Barth has spent much of his life struggling to survive as a writer.
Though Barth claims credit for the idea of Lennon’s cameo in Yesterday, it’s unclear that he’d have depicted him having settled into an honest living and a steady relationship, as is the case in the film. Having read a few Beatles biographies, I suspect a Lennon who failed in music would have had a more difficult life than the film suggests.
While Paul McCartney was always likely to smuggle himself into show business – even proposing at one point to jettison his bandmates to succeed, if memory serves – without music one can easily see Lennon struggling to hold down a job and a woman, much like his father. Even with the Beatles’ success, much of Lennon’s life was troubled.
Curtis is also uniquely ill-suited to claim that professional success is overrated, having enjoyed so much of it during his life. If it were that disappointing he’d surely have retired long ago.
The image of the star who feels trapped in tawdry isolation at the top is enough of a cliche that there must be something to it. But it doesn’t follow that domestic bliss can fill any void, even if The La’s’ Lee Mavers prefers suburban obscurity to banging his head against another record studio wall.
I’m not the first to point out that Inside Llewyn Davis is a far more credible film on what the craving for success can do to a man who rushes between musical opportunities without much reward. Before Yesterday’s blackout, Malik seems to have reached the end of a similar bargain, promising to abandon a road of empty venues and bored punters.
Would he have quit though? Why does anybody quit? Most of my school friends’ guitars gather dust in their flats or their parents’ attics. But at open mics I’ve seen plenty of older men still trying to run down some kind of dream. Some bands were born to play on, even without an audience.