| RATING: | 60% |
| FORMAT: | DVD |
Yet another film about the youth of John Lennon pretending to tell us the untold story that has been told many times before!
The idea that John Lennon was a genius is fatuous in the extreme, yet this is a fine film of a story that has been done to death when one would have thought that there was nothing new to say. That this hagiography lacks honesty is to be expected since Mr Lennon was one of the few White performers to make a successful career from a Black musical form.
John Lennon’s fear and abuse of women is absent, his insecurities, his rampant cynicism and his general misanthropy. Nor is the fact represented that, despite being raised in comfortable middle-class suburbia, he tried to pass himself off in later life as a working-class hero. No child prodigy this - and a man with an uneventful and rather mundane life that in no way suggests a budding genius. No more nor less interesting than millions of others who are abandoned by both their parents, The Beatles turned out to be no more than Black American artistes’ tribute band (with classical-music pretensions).
Directed by a woman, this is a female-identified film as though the complex character that was John Lennon could be explained solely by his relations with women. The movie also plays the Freudian game of reducing human nature to little more than the sum of one’s neuroses. For the emotionally childish this is fine, but for grownups it represents the limitations of a culture that produces such limited people: Psychoanalysis for so-called creative artists.
In the end, this film cannot decide if John Lennon was a disturbed rebel or a creative genius and conflates the two groups. The decline in Lennon’s creativity after The Beatles’ split (as with the decline in quality of Gilbert & Sullivan’s work after they separated) shows he was the former while the film suggests its belief in the latter.
Kristin SCOTT THOMAS is excellent - as ever - as is Anne-Marie DUFF: Superb acting; poor dramaturgy. This is a drama made by those who are more concerned with claiming to have had similar experiences to John Lennon than making a perspicacious film about Mr Lennon. This narcissistic self-indulgence makes the creators out to be as creative as Mr Lennon when the film clearly shows that they are not. Hero worshiping is not the same as saying that the person you worship is like the worshiper - as implied here - since too many creative people are empty vessels making the most noise. Without any real level of understanding between the re-enactor and the re-enacted there is no real re-enactment, because we never get to an understanding as an audience of the people so represented.
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