It’s ridiculous and indulgent at all times … Yet there is a weird and heavy backwash of sadness at the end, a kind of melancholy comedown, and I can’t quite decide if that was intentional or not (The Guardian, Richard Curtis’ magical mystery tour of a world without the Beatles).
For my generation, in the wasteland of contemporary music, a Beatlesless world is hard to imagine. Boyle, my age, tries to do it, with a comedy that needs the spectator’s ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ to go through. This is the story of a hopeless singer-songwriter who is the only one in the whole world to remember the Fab Four’s songs; he rises to world fame making them his own tunes, comes across the nasty L.A. music business, and in the end confesses his sin for love’s sake. The same human touch Boyle had for the drop-outs of Trainspotting is here again, in a amor vincit omnia finale which is not the same as a Hollywood trad happy end. As for me, hopeless musician, teacher and pop lover, the identification with the protagonists is all too easy. There is nostalgia indeed, but also that touch of sadness and melancholy the Guardian‘s review points out, and that adds value to a movie worth seeing, no doubt, and not because the Beatles were just entertainers.