The 53rd Times BFI London Festival has been pretty good to us, so far – we’ve seen more good movies in the past few weeks than in the rest of the year combined, with relatively few disappointments, and it’s been a much stronger year than last. It’s a shame then, that the closing night film, “Nowhere Boy,” is such a misfire. We’d been faintly concerned about the movie for a while, but director, and former artist, Sam Taylor-Wood’s debut short film “Love You More” was so good, and we’d heard such great buzz about the script, that we’d been holding out hope. Unfortunately, these were dashed fairly soundly when we caught the movie itself.
“Walk Hard,” the Judd Apatow-produced musical biopic parody, is not a good movie. At all. But it occasionally made some salient points about the genre, which we hoped had killed some of the cliches for good. But, “Nowhere Boy” opens, to the sound of Aunt Mimi (Kristin Scott-Thomas), the guardian of John Lennon (Aaron Johnson), reminding her ward “Glasses!”. He immediately puts on the iconic, round-framed Lennon glasses, and cycles past ‘Strawberry Fields,’ and you groan a little inwardly. Although it calms down after the opening salvo, the film can’t resist these smug little references: you’re somehow surprised that, during the first meeting of Lennon and Paul McCartney (Thomas Brodie Sangster), the two actors barely manage to restrain themselves from winking at the camera. It’s glib and reductive, and makes you long for the sensitive treatment of an artist in “Bright Star”: he writes poetry, he’s good at it, get over it.
There’s a strange dichotomy at work in the film; it seems to want to both mythologize its subject, but also show that he’s ‘just like us.’ The outcome is the worst of both worlds, and the central problem with the film lies with Aaron Johnson, who isn’t a terrible actor, but flat out wrong for Lennon, both in looks and performance, and not once do you look at him and feel that he’s embodying the Beatle. There should be a certain degree of arrogance and petulance to the performance, but we spent most of the film wanting to headbutt Johnson, he was so unlikeable. There’s no sense of love of music or poetry, none of Lennon’s more sensitive side, to the performance: he comes off as a bully and a prick. He gets into rock n roll principally to pick up girls (which, let’s face it, has always been the principal motivation for most rock stars), but that pretty much continues to be Lennon’s driving force, other than a hamfisted device where he’s given his first harmonica by his uncle shortly before he dies, which makes the whole thing come across as a Merseybeat version of “Spider-Man.” When a film that’s ostensibly about John Lennon manages to make Paul McCartney look like the real genius of The Beatles, you know you’re in trouble, and that’s impressive considering how miscast Sangster (“Love Actually”) is as McCartney.
Of course, the principal hook of the movie doesn’t actually follow the forming of The Beatles, but instead focuses on the triangle between Lennon, his birth mother Julia (a strong performance from Anne-Marie Duff), and his aunt. It’s here that the film’s salvation comes. Kristin Scott-Thomas is incredibly good as Aunt Mimi, strong yet brittle, acting as the voice of authority, but letting a beating heart show through where necessary. It’s one of her very best performances, the emotional center of the film, and proof, if proof were needed, that she’s on the best form of her career. If the film were to be released before the end of the year (and, being a Weinstein Company movie, there’s not a chance in hell they have enough money to put it out) it would be a strong contender for the Best Supporting Actress Oscar. There are other good performances from the older members of the cast — David Threlfall does an awful lot with a few brief scenes, and David Morrissey is layered and sympathetic as Julia’s husband.
Even considering the performances of Scott-Thomas and other actors, this thread of the movie still doesn’t work. There’s a strangely abrupt quality to it (the editing isn’t great, we’ve got to say); it drops in and out of the picture, and then rushes through vital scenes. There’s a strangely Oedipal quality to the relationship between Lennon and his birth mother which hints at a more interesting film, but it’s never followed through on, and makes it seem out of place. Ultimately, Taylor-Wood has made a very conventional film; disappointing, considering her background as a visual artist. It succeeds in some places, particularly when Scott-Thomas is involved, but also in its depiction of teenage life, which does feel vital and authentic. The one aspect of Lennon’s character it does nail is the humour — from showing him listening to “The Goon Show,” to the one-liners spouted both by the young Lennon and by Mimi, writer Matt Greenhalgh nails Lennon’s absurdist sense of comedy. These are minor victories, however — when it comes to the grander points, “Nowhere Boy” is an abject failure. [D+]