Bob Marley: One Love
“What is the point?” This is a question that I constantly asked myself during the hours and hours of watching “Bob Marley: One Love,” a flat biopic that has no perspective or originality. It’s just another one of those origin stories about music that seem more like they’re trying to sell new pressings of old hits than tell an interesting story. For all their faults, even something like “Bohemian Rhapsody” or “Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance with Somebody” at least pretended to care about their chart topping subjects. But between the bad plotting and the unbearably empty dialogue, “One Love” acts like Marley the person is a record scratch ruining its jukebox spin.
This is filmmaker Reinaldo Marcus Green’s fault mostly. After his debut “Monsters and Men” showed some promise, he followed it up with saccharine true story “Joe Bell.” You could forgive him for that, he came on late in the process. Then he went and made “King Richard,” a sports family drama that won Will Smith Best Actor even though it was filled with caricatures. In “One Love,” Green once again falls back on broad themes struggle, trauma and flimsy concepts of real people that sunk his previous movies.
But as much blame as Green deserves for this movie being bad, he’s not alone in screwing it up. The script credited to Green along with Terence Winter, Frank E Flowers and Zach Baylin is absolutely terrible, an unshaped stream of events delivered with all the nuance of bullet points.
The story takes place directly from 1976 through 1978, Marley (who already was) becoming a powerhouse political voice in Jamaica, planning a unity concert to stop violence between two warring political leaders. We quickly meet Marley’s large family lots of kids through his wife and affairs, which the movie does acknowledge his supportive wife Rita (Lashana Lynch), nefarious manager Don Taylor, and a few of his bandmates from the Wailers. With the compound style home surrounded by high walls and men with machine guns, we get early indication that Marley’s life is in constant danger. We also know he enjoys jogging and soccer. And that’s about it.
For a while you think this movie is going to be about the Smile Jamaica concert. Unfortunately, we zip through said gig as if the filmmakers are terrified of ever going more than 10 minutes without music happening. There’s no sense for Marley’s artistry, or the political forces on the ground or any imperative people in his life before Donald, Rita and Marley are shot by assassins (one being an underused Michael Ward), forcing the sickly trio to leave country. Marley and his Wailers go to London; they start recording new record there. Rita and family go to Delaware to live with Marley’s mother. Why she lives in America is never really explained, nor is she seen much on screen.
In “One Love,” the writing has a way of sanding what should be delicate narrative curves into harsh inelegant edges. Trite flashbacks quickly show us insecure young Bob getting bullied at school because he has white father who abandoned him, these same scenes give us whirlwind courtship between him and Rita and flashback depiction of Wailers getting their first record deal that takes three seconds flat all while trying to make sure our butt never actually leaves seat for longer than microsecond.
It’s all sappy, like the syrupy lighting used by DP Robert Elswit. You think the movie is going to be about recording Exodus: Rapid renditions of the album’s title track and super hits like “Jammin” traffic in the usual cinematic songwriting cliches where a tune gets written in five seconds flat. Marley catches the Wailers listening to the soundtrack to “Exodus” — boom, that’s the album title. Before you know it, they’re on tour in Europe.
Throughout this music biopic, you can’t stop waiting for “One Love” to actually be about something or at least have a point of view on Marley’s politics, Rastafarian religion or even reggae; instead, Green saddles everyone with bad wigs and hackneyed dialogue against ugly compositions while uplifting anthems get downgraded into banal set pieces. Toward the end, for instance, Marley sings “Redemption Songs” around a campfire as his children slowly gather round him, their faces gleaming with giddy excitement as if lit by crackling flames.
No actor escapes the film’s milquetoast ethos: Though Ben-Adir commits himself to imitating every one of Marley’s gestures, his physicality during concert sequences comes off as mechanical memorization rather than organic musicality; nor does it help him that Green frames these shows so staidly a mix of distant mediums that only flatten everything out further. It’s just pretty flat. Overwrought monologues drain Lynch of her magnetism (usually so bewitching): “Sometimes,” she tells Marley with such commitment to character that her ungraceful words deserve better “sometimes the messenger becomes the message.” In Marley’s story Rita is too often left adrift, only appearing whenever she has either dense exposition or sage advice handy to contextualize a marriage whose filmic rendering doesn’t match the picture’s title. We get no sense of what drew Marley and Rita together or how they remained such a strong force in spite of Marley’s philandering.
Before the movie began, there was a video message from Ziggy Marley, Bob Marley’s son: He promised this would be an “authentic depiction” of his father. When it comes to art I despise “authenticity,” which by the very nature of the word immediately presumes the existence of a definitive truth; I’d rather have a sincere picture, a movie interested in the knottiness of a person and the complexity of the life they lived. “One Love” has none of that rhythm, spark or vitality the things that gave Marley’s soulful music its bounce.
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