Pop, as quite a few musicologists have observed, is 'mom': a couple of three letter words with a deep symbiotic relationship. A relationship occasionally verging, as Nowhere Boy suggests, on the inappropriate. From Jim Morrison scandalously acting out the myth of Oedipus in 'The End', to Roger Waters plaintively asking his suffocating matriarch "Do you think she's good enough for me?" in Pink Floyd's The Wall, the history of 'mother love' among male singers is long.
John Lennon, a hierophant among pop's arch-confessors, certainly had his fair share of 'mother issues', as evinced by the White Album's 'Julia', a supremely moving and delicate tribute to his late mother, lyrically enmeshed with a love poem to Yoko Ono. Later, on his debut solo album, he'd give full vent to the peculiarly ambiguous relationship via a full-throated primal scream: "Mother, you had me, but I never had you."
That ambiguity lies at the heart of artist Sam Taylor-Wood's first full-length feature, the first Lennon biopic to brave a fuller excavation of one of pop's saddest back stories, and one of its most complicated psychologies; a man with a distinctly wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am attitude toward the fairer sex, but who'd also refer to Ono as 'Mother.'
As chronicled in the film, we see how the boy Lennon was raised by his aunt, Mary 'Mimi' Smith, who took him in after it was thought that her younger sister was incapable of looking after him properly. In his teens, which is when the film properly begins, he goes on to pinball between the two very different women, the stoic Mimi (a surprisingly well-cast Kristin Scott Thomas, transplanting that glorious sang-froid to Liverpool) and the flighty, possibly manic-depressive Julia (Anne Marie Duff, also excellent). Living just round the corner, and closer to her son's age, Julia buys him his first guitar, and introduces him to rock 'n' roll, before, tragically, she's knocked down and killed by an off-duty drunk-driving policeman when Lennon is 17.
In Matt (Control) Greenhalgh's screenplay, we first spot Julia lurking in the cemetery, during a funeral for John's Uncle George; she is already among the dead. And there is something truly doomed about her, a butterfly fluttering toward the flame, as her belated reunion with John approaches, though never quite nudges, incest. "I love you, you're my dream" the ultimate MILF tells him, during a mother and son's stroll down Blackpool promenade that feels uncomfortably close to a date. And she tells him what the phrase 'rock n roll' really means, while flirting with sailors in front of the jealous guy. "She'll hurt you" warns Mimi, lashing her metaphorical apron strings like steel whips. Adding, "Your mother has always needed company. Do you know what I mean by 'company'?"
This is tough stuff. With the exception of Christopher Munch's lo-fi masterpiece The Hours And Times, it's darker than previous Beatles biopics, and though it takes a few liberties with the timeline, the emotional honesty rings true. As far as these kinds of parcelled middlebrow dramas go (in which everyone achieves a tidy sort of redemption and closure before the credits), it is perfectly respectable. But it is also significantly, perhaps even fatally, flawed.
Despite some gripes, it's not tremendously important that the actors playing the nascent Beatles look nothing like their real-life counterparts; although, in all honesty, Barack Obama, Devendra Banhart and Robert Pershing Wadlow (the world's tallest man, 1918-1940) look more like John, George and Paul than this bunch.
But in casting Aaron Johnson as Lennon, you can't help thinking the producers have gone for beauty and youth over dynamism. Johnson (who, in a fairground-mirror reflection of the dynamic playing out on screen has just become engaged to the much older Sam Taylor Wood) possesses the artist's dreaminess - actually, he has something of the puppy-eyed pre-Saturday Night Fever Travolta about him - but lacks brittleness. The hardness. The element that made Ian Hart's rendition so conclusively definitive in The Hours And Times and Backbeat. Even when head-butting fellow band members, you can tell his heart isn't really in it. This current vogue for casting pretty boys in big leading roles (see: Robert Pattinson's Salvador Dali in Little Ashes, Zac Efron in Me And Orson Welles) may be honey to the box office bee, but it's railroading pictures. And anyway, the thing about Lennon was, he wasn't pretty. That was Paul's job.
There is also an appallingly clunky wedge of exposition in the final act, which seems to zoom in from nowhere, as Mimi relates to the tearful lad and the quaking Julia how her sister and Lennon's errant father Alf fought for ownership of the boy. It's awful and embarrassing, with Gothic, doomy chords punctuating the drama, like something out of a Jane Austen adaptation, while Mimi might as well be intoning, "Gather ye round and harken! It was a dark and stormy night..." It's a mystifying misstep in a film that previously only implies and hints at childhood trauma in flashback, and is all the more powerful for it.
More successfully evoked is the mothballed late 1950s, but also a sense of real change coming up from the streets. The Beatles' origin story is also well realised, with Lennon furiously attempting to stamp his will on an ersatz family. In Paul McCartney (Thomas Sangster), he'd find a talent to match his own, and a more pragmatic, prematurely world-weary confidante; McCartney's mother died two years before John's. In perhaps the most moving scene of all, the then Quarrymen file into Percy Phillips' Liverpool recording studio in 1958 to lay down the track 'In spite of all the danger.' The sense of lost boys mewling for their absent mothers is palpable.
John Lennon, a hierophant among pop's arch-confessors, certainly had his fair share of 'mother issues', as evinced by the White Album's 'Julia', a supremely moving and delicate tribute to his late mother, lyrically enmeshed with a love poem to Yoko Ono. Later, on his debut solo album, he'd give full vent to the peculiarly ambiguous relationship via a full-throated primal scream: "Mother, you had me, but I never had you."
That ambiguity lies at the heart of artist Sam Taylor-Wood's first full-length feature, the first Lennon biopic to brave a fuller excavation of one of pop's saddest back stories, and one of its most complicated psychologies; a man with a distinctly wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am attitude toward the fairer sex, but who'd also refer to Ono as 'Mother.'
As chronicled in the film, we see how the boy Lennon was raised by his aunt, Mary 'Mimi' Smith, who took him in after it was thought that her younger sister was incapable of looking after him properly. In his teens, which is when the film properly begins, he goes on to pinball between the two very different women, the stoic Mimi (a surprisingly well-cast Kristin Scott Thomas, transplanting that glorious sang-froid to Liverpool) and the flighty, possibly manic-depressive Julia (Anne Marie Duff, also excellent). Living just round the corner, and closer to her son's age, Julia buys him his first guitar, and introduces him to rock 'n' roll, before, tragically, she's knocked down and killed by an off-duty drunk-driving policeman when Lennon is 17.
In Matt (Control) Greenhalgh's screenplay, we first spot Julia lurking in the cemetery, during a funeral for John's Uncle George; she is already among the dead. And there is something truly doomed about her, a butterfly fluttering toward the flame, as her belated reunion with John approaches, though never quite nudges, incest. "I love you, you're my dream" the ultimate MILF tells him, during a mother and son's stroll down Blackpool promenade that feels uncomfortably close to a date. And she tells him what the phrase 'rock n roll' really means, while flirting with sailors in front of the jealous guy. "She'll hurt you" warns Mimi, lashing her metaphorical apron strings like steel whips. Adding, "Your mother has always needed company. Do you know what I mean by 'company'?"
This is tough stuff. With the exception of Christopher Munch's lo-fi masterpiece The Hours And Times, it's darker than previous Beatles biopics, and though it takes a few liberties with the timeline, the emotional honesty rings true. As far as these kinds of parcelled middlebrow dramas go (in which everyone achieves a tidy sort of redemption and closure before the credits), it is perfectly respectable. But it is also significantly, perhaps even fatally, flawed.
Despite some gripes, it's not tremendously important that the actors playing the nascent Beatles look nothing like their real-life counterparts; although, in all honesty, Barack Obama, Devendra Banhart and Robert Pershing Wadlow (the world's tallest man, 1918-1940) look more like John, George and Paul than this bunch.
But in casting Aaron Johnson as Lennon, you can't help thinking the producers have gone for beauty and youth over dynamism. Johnson (who, in a fairground-mirror reflection of the dynamic playing out on screen has just become engaged to the much older Sam Taylor Wood) possesses the artist's dreaminess - actually, he has something of the puppy-eyed pre-Saturday Night Fever Travolta about him - but lacks brittleness. The hardness. The element that made Ian Hart's rendition so conclusively definitive in The Hours And Times and Backbeat. Even when head-butting fellow band members, you can tell his heart isn't really in it. This current vogue for casting pretty boys in big leading roles (see: Robert Pattinson's Salvador Dali in Little Ashes, Zac Efron in Me And Orson Welles) may be honey to the box office bee, but it's railroading pictures. And anyway, the thing about Lennon was, he wasn't pretty. That was Paul's job.
There is also an appallingly clunky wedge of exposition in the final act, which seems to zoom in from nowhere, as Mimi relates to the tearful lad and the quaking Julia how her sister and Lennon's errant father Alf fought for ownership of the boy. It's awful and embarrassing, with Gothic, doomy chords punctuating the drama, like something out of a Jane Austen adaptation, while Mimi might as well be intoning, "Gather ye round and harken! It was a dark and stormy night..." It's a mystifying misstep in a film that previously only implies and hints at childhood trauma in flashback, and is all the more powerful for it.
More successfully evoked is the mothballed late 1950s, but also a sense of real change coming up from the streets. The Beatles' origin story is also well realised, with Lennon furiously attempting to stamp his will on an ersatz family. In Paul McCartney (Thomas Sangster), he'd find a talent to match his own, and a more pragmatic, prematurely world-weary confidante; McCartney's mother died two years before John's. In perhaps the most moving scene of all, the then Quarrymen file into Percy Phillips' Liverpool recording studio in 1958 to lay down the track 'In spite of all the danger.' The sense of lost boys mewling for their absent mothers is palpable.