Jason Bailey
If it hadn’t already been announced, the proliferation of news items and social media discussion about Sam Mendes’s Beatle-biopic quartet on April 1 would’ve felt like a particularly strained April Fools gag. It was merely unfortunate timing, the announcement of key additional details at the annual studio hype-fest CinemaCon, that caused us all to consider this ill-advised venture, in which Mendes will make not one, but four biographical dramas, each one focusing on a member of the Fab Four. “Perhaps this is a chance to understand them a little more deeply,” Mendes said of the effort, as if it were a question of volume — that we’d finally manage to grasp the complexities and nuances of this musical group, were it not for the pressing shortage of motion pictures about them. In fact, quite the opposite is true: there are too damn many movies about the Beatles.
I should know — I’m the target audience. I’ve been a Beatles fan for forty-plus years now, since my Uncle Dave first dropped a needle on Meet the Beatles for me when I was eight years old, and movies about the group have always been a vital piece of my fandom puzzle. The first movie we ever rented, the weekend my dad finally splurged on a VCR, was A Hard Day’s Night. The first R-rated movie I saw in the theater was the authorized documentary Imagine: John Lennon. And one of the first movies I ever taped off television was The Compleat Beatles, the feature-length 1982 film that was, at that time, seen as the definitive Beatles doc.
That movie is hard to see these days — it never made it past VHS and laserdisc (you can usually find it on archive.org) — because Paul McCartney bought it and buried it in the mid-1990s, when the group made their definitive Beatles doc, the multi-part Beatles Anthology. That speaks to the maximalism that has overtaken the Beatles movie as a subgenre; the succinct Compleat was replaced by the sprawling Anthology, the already-scarce Let It Be was usurped by the multi-part Get Back; and the seemingly-sufficient Imagine: John Lennon has been complemented by an inexhaustible supply of John & Yoko documentaries, intent on documenting and preserving the decade between the Beatles’ break-up and Lennon’s death in something like real time.
The most recent of them is One to One: John & Yoko, from director Kevin McDonald, which plays theaters (including several IMAX venues) this weekend, and will eventually land on HBO/Max. Its specific subject is the 18 or so months, beginning in late 1971, when the couple moved from London to New York City, where they lived in a modest Village loft apartment, watching TV, writing songs, and making occasional public appearances, culminating in the “One to One” benefit — his only full-length post-Beatles concert.
The footage and audio of that performance are not new; it was unearthed and released, as a live album and concert video, in 1986. (Recycling and reappropriating are par for the course in Beatles cinema; aside from the aforementioned Get Back / Let It Be, last year’s Disney+ documentary Beatles ’64 reused much of the Maysles Brothers footage that had been previously used in their own 1964 doc What’s Happening! The Beatles in the U.S.A., and which was previously re-edited for the 1991 video release The Beatles: The First U.S. Visit.) And there have been so many John & Yoko documentaries in recent years that pieces of One to One feel like MCU-style (or, I guess, Medes Beatles biopics-style) crossovers: the entire NYC period was previously covered in the made-for-TV doc LennoNYC; we see clips of their appearances on The Mike Douglas Show, which were themselves the topic of last year’s Daytime Revolution; an audio appearance by assistant-turned-fling May Pang foreshadows the 2022 documentary The Lost Weekend: A Love Story; and some time is spent on Lennon’s fight to avoid deportation, itself the topic of the 2006 doc The U.S. vs. John Lennon.
So what does One to One offer that’s new, then? Well, there is the (not inconsiderable) novelty of seeing a documentary in IMAX — specifically for the concert footage, which looks and sounds incredible, particularly when compared to the existing concert film. The proximity of the audience to the performers is often staggering, particularly the big IMAX close-ups as Lennon wails “Mother,” one of his most personal songs. And McDonald juxtaposes, often effectively, those performances with contemporaneous archival footage: Vietnam combat and aftermath to “Instant Karma” (along with Nixon dancing with his daughter at her wedding), “Cold Turkey” with the contemptuous 1972 Republican convention in Miami, “Imagine” to the gathering of disabled kids in Central Park on the day of the big concert.
But the material surrounding that footage mostly just made this viewer wish it were a straight-up IMAX concert film. (I was reminded of how the rote, Ron Howard-directed, Hulu-funded 2016 documentary The Beatles: Eight Days a Week – The Touring Years was only worth seeing in its limited theatrical engagements, where it was followed by a 30-minute mini-movie of The Beatles at Shea Stadium.) Some of the archival footage is of passing interest, particularly when it takes the mood of the nation; the 1972 presidential campaign was underway, and it is obviously not that hard to draw the line from then to now, and from George Wallace to Donald Trump, and one cannot help but shudder at candidate Shirley Chisholm’s prediction that “This constant malaise that’s hanging over this country is going to eventually destroy all of us.”
Yet too much of the running time is spent on MacDonald’s recurring channel-surfing motif. The idea is that John and Yoko spent much of this time watching TV (“It’s our window to the world,” he explains), so the film clicks through what they might have seen, including, often, themselves. It functions as valuable context, sure — a reminder of the turbulent history brewing around them. But some of it also feels like padding; the picture runs 100 minutes but if feels longer, because it’s so aimless. Not scattershot or random, mind you. It just doesn’t particularly go anywhere.
I can recognize that One to One is well-made, well-researched, and impeccably assembled. But at a certain point, I found myself half-watching, because there’s nothing left for me to learn on this particular subject. Early on, Lennon is heard explaining, “I don’t wanna recreate the past. I wanna be me now.” But who was that? Later on, we see a throwaway moment of him eating cereal and mugging, and it’s striking because it’s a mood we’ve rarely seen him in, and it’s not a moment staged for the camera, but shared with the person behind it (Yoko, presumably). It stands out because, for once, it feels like he’s not performing, but existing. Yet because he became a worldwide celebrity at such a tender age (barely in his 20s), he spent most of his life performing, putting on an act for the camera, being what we expected John Lennon to be. That’s the quality that makes him so hard to pin down as a cinematic subject — though God knows, that hasn’t stopped scores of filmmakers from trying.
“One to One: John and Yoko” opens exclusively in IMAX on April 11. It will expand to other theaters in the weeks to follow, before its HBO and MAX premiere.
