Although every cinematic biopic is liable to be compared to the reality of its subjects, there’s no immediate artistic value in overzealous fidelity to truth in film. Instead, what we hope for most, is a film that conveys the spirit and ethos of its subject. Common biopic norms have resulted in two primary modes of real-life cinematic distillations. A biopic might approach its story as a womb-to-tomb entry that covers the subject’s life, or it might drop us into a specific moment in a great person’s life where we examine how that critical moment became part of a legacy,
“Bob Marley: One Love”, the third consecutive biopic directed by Reinaldo Marcus Green, ostensibly seems like the latter at first. It opens with title-cards announcing the fraught political context of 1976 Jamaica and Marley’s decision to hold a peace concert to bring the warring factions together. Soon enough, though, we find the screenplay weaving threads of the recent and distant past turning the film into a nonlinear version of the traditional childhood-to-death biopic. It’s a tall order for the film that’s only 107 minutes, as it traces Marley’s European rise to fame on the back of his album “Exodus”. The appreciation for the music is clear. Childhood moments, including a recurring motif of a Bob as a child surrounded by a billowing fire, punctuate the narrative. In approaching this story through the familiar lens of traditional biopics, “One Love” seems to eschew the philosophy of the man behind the music. We are offered diverting accounts of moments in life, but the spiritual and philosophical legacy feels hazy.
The main crisis of the film’s first quarter is Marley’s insistence on the holding a concert for the people, and the ensuing attempt on his life that injured Marley (played by Kingsley Ben-Adir), his wife Rita (Lashawna Lynch), and their associates Don Taylor and Louis Griffiths. When we meet Marley in 1976, he has already established a politically progressive musical career but it’s an absolute truth that “One Love” feels unable to effectively evoke this. As Bob weighs the purpose of his socially conscious music and speaks with Jamaican intellectuals, I found myself wondering where the real people were to show what this music means to the community Bob loves so much. The entire ethos of Marley’s musical legacy has been his grassroots connection to the people. The root of his insistence on making his work publicly accessible, particularly for poor Black people, was central to his musicianship as well as to his spirituality. And yet, with its eye zoned in on Bob the man, so much of “One Love” seems to consider Bob away from the very grassroots most central to his ideology. It’s a disconnect that persists for much of the film.
Late in “One Love”, Marley tells us that his life is for the people. But little that we see onscreen feels geared towards celebrating that and it’s a schism that emphasises a critical flaw in “One Love”, and perhaps in too many films based on real people. What is the thesis here? It’s not enough for a film like this to be satisfied with a thesis that is merely “these things happened to this famous person”. There must be something deeper, there must be something more profound otherwise the value of a life feels bound in its own ephemerality. Sequence after sequence of Marley finds Ben-Adir dutifully imitating the loose-limbed dancing of Marley, while I found myself yearning for the screen to show us the audience’s relationship with that music. If a biopic can conjure the spirit of its subject, that magic trick is much more impressive than historical fidelity. Instead, “One Love” feels too bound in its existence as a shiny, tidy account of major and minor moments in Marley’s life, devoid of the idiosyncratic identity and energy to reflect the man at its centre.
To think of Bob Marley is to think of Jamaica, yet rather than the spirit of Jamaica looming like a sceptre over the atmosphere so much of the country’s presence here feels lacking in identity. We learn much of the country’s contexts through dialogue and paragraphs against black text rather than eclectic scenes of a country in crisis. Ben-Adir offers a very earnest performance as Bob, but and in sequences of executives delighted at the success of his music, or images of his music rising on the charts, or montage after breathless montage of Bob and his team visiting an array of European cities to signal the post-“Exodus” fame. Even amidst the multiple scenes in Europe, we never find “One Love” engaging with what his music does to the people. This music is for the people. They want it. They need it. But “One Love” traps us in a narrow vantage point. It is as if the music exists in a vacuum, antithetical to the communal themes that dialogue announces but the film rarely reflects.
It’s a similar crisis that find Lynch and Ben-Adir trying to carve tension out of the relationship between Rita and Bob when the film only inconsistently offers them limited opportunities to turn these figures into real people.
The film was written by Terence Winter, Frank E Flowers, Zach Baylin and Reinaldo Marcus Green and I suspect that much of it was left on the cutting room floor, as too much of what we see on screen robs the characters of much identity in their conversations. It’s a likely effect of the brief running time, but there’s rarely a chance for the characters to settle into the world they inhabit and to simply be in the spaces around them. Instead, each moment of dialogue feels like a convenient set-up to move a plot-point further rather than engaging with them as people.
This is reflected in a late-film argument between the couple, one of many confrontations in “One Love” that seem to come out of nowhere. What works about the scene, the only one to nod to the sometimes-fraught dynamics of their marriage and its extramarital affairs, is primarily dependent on Lynch and Ben-Adir who evoke a sensibility in their relationship that the actual text of the film feels less precise in achieving. It arrives out of nowhere and then dissipates just as easily. Many scenes later when it’s referenced (in the timeline of the film it could be weeks or months later) they both agree it’s irrelevant. But the film’s frantic pacing, from moment to moment, never allows us to really settle with the implications of the pain that lingers beneath the surface.
So much of what is devoted to the crawl text feels like material that would have been better conveyed through images and drama. Show us the people signing to Marley. Show us the way his music persists. Don’t tell us. Show us. In one of the last scenes in “One Love” we hear some bars from Marley’s “Redemption Song”. Rita listens in awe, wondering how long he has been writing it. “All my life,” he says. But the actual film offers little of that profundity. If I believed that line, it had more to do with the earnest way Kingsley approaches the character and less to do with “One Love” and its own approach to representing this man. This is too composed, too tidy. From the too immaculate costumes that don’t feel lived-in enough, the respectful hair and makeup that is functional but is often too composed; this tidiness is even there in the sound mixing. When Bob sings “Turn your lights down low” to Rita in a private moment, the sheen of the sound mixing makes it sound too composed, too performed. Where is the raw vitality that is inherent to this man?
The fight for liberation, music as a means of social change, the value of resisting imperialistic notions through Rastafarianism. These are all ideas that “One Love” speaks to, but they are not ideas that feel like the texture of the actual film, or the people in it. The film we get is diverting enough, offering a dutiful account of Bob Marley. It seems like the ideal film for classrooms to show a tidy account of his music. Rather than being built in the image of its gritty, authentic protagonist, “One Love” feels too anodyne to represent the subversiveness of the man at its centre.
“Bob Marley: One Love” is currently playing in local cinemas.
