This is a movie by studio artist Sam Taylor Wood about the young John Lennon (Aaron Johnson, recently of Kick-Ass) in his mid-teen years in Liverpool. He is a good looking young lad, interested in girls and rock 'n' roll. He lives with his aunt (Kristin Scott Thomas) and uncle in a nice middle-class area. One day he meets his birth mother, Julia (Anne-Marie Duff), who gave him up when he was a little boy. She is a bright, young, sexy woman who is overjoyed at being reunited with him.
The two have an instant connection over their shared love for American R&B and rock music. John subsequently meets a young Paul McCartney and George Harrison and has an instant musical bond with them too. They begin to play shows as the Quarrymen and gain a local following. As this is happening, John is fighting an internal battle over his true feelings for his mother.
There are a few different stories in this film. One is certainly John's musical journey from English skiffle to American R&B to blues and rock. His mother teaches him how to play the banjo and guitar (sorta weird, because I believe the fingering is different on both) and he picks them up with little trouble.
There is also a story of John as a rather reckless young man searching for direction and identity in the world. He goes from being a bad-boy in school to being a rock star and taking on more and more responsibility. His relationship with his aunt, who has become a mother to him, of course, grows over time too. Their relationship is strained by the arrival of his mother (her sister) and they work to see eye to eye about their bond.
The most unexpected part of the film is the suggestion that John had a very specific Oedipal crush on his mother once he met her at age 16. I certainly knew that John's childhood was rather emotionally strained (being abandoned by his mother in the arms of his aunt), but I never would have expected that he had any anything other than a totally typical relationship with his mother once they reunited. I also have no idea if this is merely Taylor Wood's interpretation of the story or if there is documentary evidence of such emotions.
My main problem with a bomb like this is that I don't know what to do with it. Does this information help me better understand him as an artist? Did it change how he saw women and romantic relationships? Her certainly had an unusual relationship with Yoko (one could even say that she became a mother figure to him), but was that just co-incidence and the result of being scorned as a child, or was it more Freudian?
Unfortunately there are so many layers to the story here that this ends up being simply another item about him. I felt that the psychological aspects of this relationship was never really examined and this Oedipal idea was really just a descriptor - like the fact that he had brown hair and liked to play guitar.
Taylor Wood does a decent job with the unfocused script of Matt Greenhalgh. This is her first major feature film and she definitely has an interesting visual style and vocabulary. One of the nicest parts of the movie is the use of colors and how the palette changes through the story. The film starts out rather typically in the dark grays, blues and browns of industrial Liverpool. John's aunt is a stern woman who wears heavy cardigans and dark-colored wool.
His mother, on the other hand, is light-colored, fresh and colorful. She has bright red hair, wears bright red lipstick and colorful sweaters and dresses. Perhaps this is a bit too overt (and rather contrived), but it is a nice visual touch, I think. I really shows the world he's coming from and the world he is moving to - and helps convey the eroticism he sees in his mother.
There is much too much in this film. Between the music and the history and the psychology, it is hard to keep straight what we are supposed to be learning in the movie. I get that there was tension between John, Paul and George from the first time they met. I get that they were all musical geniuses. I get that John felt abandoned and unloved (and that this was a major part of his relationship with Paul who had lost his mother years before). But why do I care about it all? This feels more like a grocery list of things rather than an examination of John. All of these details are presented to us, but basically nothing is analyzed or dissected.
I frequently feel that bio-pics about people before they were famous are rather useless and mostly just historical masturbation by the creators. The reason I care about John Lennon is because he was a great songwriter and singer. I don't really care that he was a typically anxious teen. That's not all that interesting.
If you want to tell a specific causal relationship story - that, say, John wrote music about lovers because he lost his mother - then do that. But don't show me details of a person's youth and then not connect them to his later life when he became famous. That's all I feel that we get here.
Stars: 2 of 4
