Yesterday’s Long Shot
I’ve been enjoying a dose of magic realism these days.
Yesterday poses a quaint/fantastic premise: what if everyone in the world had forgotten The Beatles, except you?
The movie is an unabashed love letter for The Beatles, and every minute of it resonates with the message that the world is an infinitely lesser place without their music. Every time one of their songs come up, the emotions swell, and we can’t help but wish for the protagonist’s success because every song he (re)introduces feels like a gift we’ve never known but waited for nonetheless.
Long Shot, on the other hand, is the story of the SecState falling for this malcontent whom she used to babysit. While Yesterday dwells in the magic of an alternate reality, Long Shot sells us the fantasy that even if it’s highly unlikely, it’s not impossible to get the girl of your dreams — no matter how incongruous the match feels.
By nature, romcoms are dumbed down. It has to; you are, after all, comedifying something mysterious and unquantifiable as romance. In this aspect, Charlize Theron’s and Seth Rogen’s movie is a smashing success.
While both films are enjoyable enough, both have their inevitable failings. Yesterday admits it in-film: “It’s me that’s the problem, the awful truth. I know the songs are strong, but no one’s interested so... Jack Malik’s the problem,” says the protagonist. And it’s true for the entire movie. Everything else — the plot, the love angle, the editing— all the film elements play second fiddle to the music. Everything feels like a shoddy carriage carrying the princess. There’s something majestic here, you just have to get past the clumsy bits.
Long Shot is an exercise of your suspension-of-disbelief muscles. Even though I have always fancied myself as a Champion of Lost Causes/Charge at the Windmill kind-of-guy, even I found it hard to believe that the are-you-for-real-beautiful Charlize would fall in love — nay — endanger her dreams just for this guy. The film just didn’t give us enough reason why she’d feel that way. Sure, he supports her and believes in her and pushes her to ‘be true’ to herself, but those virtues were her influence to him in the first place. True, Long Shot rests on a cartooned US political climate (with a buffoon of a President and all), but even Rogen’s character feels like a cartoon of a man. It’s too two-dimensional, and we are left wondering what she sees in him at the end.
It’s a pity because Charlize expertly toned down her acting adroitness here — making her character relatable and giving us the license to like the film. Too bad not every film can be Notting Hill.
