When approaching the cinematographic biography of a popular music star, those responsible always have two essential options: cover an entire existence or, at least, a broad journey that helps understand the significance not only of their music but also of your personality; or focus on a much shorter period of life, the primary one in its artistic aspect or in its personal core, but which ends up forming a multifaceted portrait. In the first case, the greatest danger is that of superficiality: you go all the way, but you go over everything without sinking the knife into anything. In the second case, the threat comes because not all artists have an imposing dramatic core that encompasses them as artists and as human beings.
In Bob Marley: One Love, biopic by the legendary Jamaican musician, directed by Reinaldo Marcus Green and produced, among others, by Brad Pitt and by Marley's widow and singing children (Rita, Ziggy and Cedella), they have not quite decided on one option or another and have wanted to cover both. They have chosen the correct period, a short time span that goes from the prelude to the December 1976 concert in the National Heroes Park in Kingston (Jamaica), converted into a political event from the moment the organizer, the then first Minister Michael Manley, called elections when it was not yet appropriate, just the day after Marley's approval to play at the event, and thus take advantage of the star's momentum, until the concert for peace One Love, in April 1978, this one was organized by the singer himself in search of national reconciliation, at a time when Jamaica was on the brink of Civil War. A year and a half in which Marley's personal and artistic life took a huge turn and in which the events that occurred (of all kinds: musical, political, criminal and even health) had enough dramatic significance to leave him well defined there.
However, in a film that Terence Winter, one of the prestigious screenwriters of The Sopranos and creator of Boardwalk Empire, It seems that too many creators have ended up taking advantage, including the director himself, Marcus Green, and have not settled for that year and a half. They have filled it with insubstantial flashbacks (musical, religious and even feuilletonesque) that try to round out Marley's drawing, but that only muddy the whole. Among other things, because the academic staging by the director, already demonstrated in The Williams method (he biopic about the tennis-playing sisters Venus and Serena around their father), becomes snooty and somewhat bombastic with that dichotomy between the absence of the biological father (Marley was a bastard, the son of a white British soldier about whom he knew nothing and which only kept a photo) and the presence of a kind of spiritual father, recreated in the ghostly figure of the Ethiopian leader Haile Selassie, whom the musician never stops reading and idolizing.
Now, and despite the fact that Marley's womanizing side is also conspicuous by its absence (No Woman no Cry), Not everything is so reprehensible in the film. As the canons dictate, it is the music that ends up dominating and in that sense the pleasure of the creative process of an album as legendary as Exodus, also conceived in that year and a half of fear and fury, of pain and success. Bob Marley: One Love closer to the idolized lightness of Bohemian Rhapsody and some titles from the early two thousand years (mainly, Ray) that of the energy of Rocketman, lovers may like biopics more conventional. Marley's imposing personality and the musical, social and political vigor of his songs come to the rescue of the film.
BOB MARLEY: ONE LOVE
Address: Reinaldo Marcus Green.
Performers: Kingsley Ben-Amir, Lashana Lynch, James Norton, Anthony Welsh.
Gender: biopic. USA, 2024.
Duration: 104 minutes.
Premiere: February 14.
All the culture that goes with you awaits you here.
Subscribe
Babelia
The literary news analyzed by the best critics in our weekly newsletter
RECEIVE IT
Subscribe to continue reading
Read without limits
_
#39Bob #Marley #Love39 #conventional #39biopic39 #saved #vigor #music