THE CHALLENGE IN any bio pic is that of knowing what to put in and knowing what to leave out. Think of it this way: luggage is what you take with you; baggage is what you dump. It becomes even more difficult when the person(s) trying to differentiate between luggage and baggage are so intimately involved in the selection process (say, a wife for instance and her favourite son) that everything is just too damned important to leave out.
Bob Marley: One Love is such a mess of luggage and baggage that there’s no point of focus and no narrative arc. It feels like a movie scripted in a board-room. If you’re looking for insights into what made a small town, Jamaican group into the world’s biggest music power-house, with a global appeal that transcended nationality or race, look elsewhere. If you’re trying to understand why the Wailing Wailers and its genius percussionist Neville Livingston or Bunny Wailer turned into Bob Marley and his back-up band, the Wailers, look elsewhere. If you’re trying to understand why the album regarded as the best of the twentieth century, Exodus, so brilliant articulated the zeitgeist of the age, look elsewhere.
But if you want baggage, producers Rita Marley (Bob’s wife and son) Ziggy sure have a movie for you.
ALL THE IMPORTANT events in Marley’s life, from his earliest memories of abandonment by his white, cum proxy slave-master father to his first encounters with Rita, his first beloved, his involvement with Rastafarianism and everything in between, catalogued and compiled by someone in the hope that no-one can complain of something, anything, missing, it’s all here; in condensed form… a sort of Liner notes version of a life.
Often the scenes don’t lead anywhere (In one, Marley tells Rita that he was born Nestor but his friends called him Robbie. Which begs the question, why? We’ll never know. Marley and Rita are gunned down; cut to Marley running into the hospital pushing the gurney with Rita on it. So was he actually shot? How came the speedy recovery?). The creative idea (whose?) was clearly that more was better than less. Ahem, except one major event – his relationship with Cindy Breakspeare, his white mistress, Miss Jamaica and mother of son Damian Marley – and a few other women here and there (and pretty much everywhere else). Rita after all produced the movie (“hell hath no fury etc.”)
But no matter, it’s a perfectly pleasant movie. The music’s great; Bob and Rita are well-acted (by Kingsley Ben-Adir and Lashana Lynch: two Brits with flawless Jamaican accents); and Marley’s edgy sexiness has been burnished into a Bridgeton type brown beauty.
It’s all Bob and all Rita all the time. Chris Blackwell who shaped the Wailers and made them acceptable to a white Western audience is there, smiling and nodding but without any defined character (Norton who plays Blackwell usurps the role usually played by ‘the wife’ character in various movies: a hazy slightly irrelevant background figure).
There are actually no defined characters. The Marley that emerges has been sandpapered into deified perfection; and Rita is the saintly presence behind his success. Bob Marley: One Love actually should have been called The Story of Saint Rita Marley And Her Singer/Songwriter Husband. And had it followed the Priscilla playbook, it would have made a more honest movie.
Don’t think of Bob Marley: One Love in the same context as, say Rocketman, in which Elton John (who produced the movie) was willing to have all the worst of his character gloriously exposed in order to make a point about truth in art. Nor should you compare this with Maestro, another movie seeking to dig into the nature of creativity. This is less a movie per se, more an exercise in branding, like the Transformer movies. The movie is there only with one purpose in mind: Re-energise the glory of Bob and sell more records.
It’s not as though the production talent is not there: the team that brought us the excellent King Richard has been reassembled. Brad Pitt is in the exec production chair. But they must all have been under “heavy manners” to deliver what the Marley family demanded.
How sad. What a sell-out. Though various anonymous characters mouth the words, the profundity of Marley’s power to galvanize and articulate the inchoate anger of Black people, and of white people seeking a more just world, and of art as a weapon against anger and violence, is a story that is still to be told.
But that will have to wait until the Marley family bow out and give real art a chance for honesty.
BOB MARKEY:ONE LOVE. Dir: Reinaldo Marcus Green (King Richard). Writers: Terence Winter (The Sopranos), Frank Flowers (Ziggy Marley Music Video), Zach Baylin (King Richard). With: Kingsley Ben-Adir (Barbie, One Night in Miami), Lashana Lynch (No Time to Die). James Norton. Cinematographer: Robert Elswit (King Richard), Production Designer: Chris Lowe (Spectre) Music: Chris Bowers (The Colour Purple)
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