Maxance Vincent
With the litany of Beatles documentaries (and, soon, a four-part “cinematic event” centered on each band member coming in 2028) that we have at our disposal, it’s hard to see how seasoned documentarians can say something new about either the fab four, or individual members of the group we didn’t already know. After all, Peter Jackson gave us the definitive Beatles documentary with his 468-minute-long The Beatles: Get Back not long ago, while Martin Scorsese also made the most essential document on George Harrison’s life with Living in the Material World. These two documentaries are, in my opinion, the best of the bunch, but since there’s so much history to contextualize around The Beatles and their members, many more documents can be made on the subject.
And yet, I was a bit skeptical that Kevin Macdonald’s latest documentary, which focuses on John Lennon and Yoko Ono, would give us something to chew on or at least make us think further about the couple’s activism with One to One: John & Yoko. The trailers made it look like a bog-standard film that would conventuionally track how their desires for change occurred particularly in relation to the only concert they did together, after viewing a news report from Geraldo Rivera on television, Willowbrook: The Last Great Disgrace, which discussed the inhumane conditions of intellectually disabled children at the Willowbrook institution in Staten Island.
The benefit concert was called “One to One,” and it not only attracted Lennon & Ono to the stage, but Stevie Wonder and a few other notable figures of the time, as they all rallied to support the children who needed humane, one-to-one care, as opposed to the horrific situation they were put in that Rivera exposed. Macdonald, who has also made films on Whitney Houston and Bob Marley, could’ve absolutely chosen the safe, handholding route in not only discussing Lennon & Ono’s activism, contextualizing the broader political backdrop of 1972, which related to Richard Nixon’s sweeping re-election, while also adding some never-before-seen, newly-remastered footage from that concert for the audience to experience for the first time on an IMAX screen.
And yet, he and co-director/editor Sam Rice-Edwards never do that. Instead, One to One: John & Yoko is more akin to a collage than a traditional documentary, where several formal approaches are juxtaposed together to create a narrative and, more importantly, a thematic thread. The film essentially communicates with archival recordings of the concert, phone conversations that John and Yoko had with various interlocutors, and several pieces of footage that either directly relate to the artists (talk show appearances, conversations with Allen Ginsberg and other important countercultural figures of the time) or showcase how divided and heated the political scene was as Nixon further grew in power, while an anti-war sentiment grew all over the United States, so much so that Lennon was planning a tour with Chicago Seven figure Jerry Rubin, that would culminate with a demonstration in front of the Republican National Convention, until threats of deportation forced the singer to cancel his appearances.
All of these fragments of a burgeoning counterculture are framed through Lennon & Ono’s apartment in Greenwich Village, where they watch television and observe what John describes as “a window to the world.” We then observe the world, exactly how the two saw it at the time: on television, switching channels, going from one point in 1970s U.S. history to the next, with no apparent relation to what we’re shown until the message is heard loud and clear, during a moment so jaw-dropping it made the few people in the 400-seat IMAX auditorium gasp in shock. It certainly isn’t an easy film to watch and dissect, visually and thematically, but the experience becomes far more rewarding when viewed on such a large screen, forcing us to have our eyes glued at the succession of images until its note-perfect final shot, one that will ruminate in your memory much longer than any archival video you’ve seen on The Beatles or John Lennon.
I had thought IMAX wouldn’t get more experimental after Brett Morgen released Moonage Daydream, but One to One: John & Yoko is even more formally dense than that film, if that’s even possible. That’s why many could be initially put off by such a presentation, especially when it frequently jumbles two pieces of footage that could not be more far apart and parallel cuts to them, as Lennon performs on stage at the One to One concert. It makes us see the world in an entirely different light that we’re accustomed to, even if some of us might also switch channels the same way as the titular artists do, or, in the case of our social-media driven era, doomscroll to see what’s going on in the further-divided society we live in today.
From the minute David Katznelson’s camera pans forward to the television and makes us enter the “window to the world,” the movie’s approach feels daring and transfixing, as urgent in its directness to engage with what is shown as was Radu Jude when he also employed collage in Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, which will likely be the most significant political film of the decade. Perhaps Macdonald’s film can often feel slightly discombobulating, but there isn’t a moment where he’s not engaging with what he’s showing us. There’s a reason why he consistently lingers on Nixon’s face or showcases how Republican voters have not changed one bit from 1972 to now and perhaps regressed even further than that time.
More importantly, he reminds us that there is nothing more powerful than sending a message and conveying exactly what you want when diffusing them on a TV screen. It is not just a window to the world but a way to mold society in the ways you want them to be shaped, either positively or negatively. Look at how he intersperses intense, often graphic, footage of violence in the Vietnam War or someone being shot with fragments of fiction television, commercials, and interviews that Lennon and Ono participated in at the time.
It’s all intentionally designed to eventually make us feel numb, both in how we assimilate information and perceive the world when we can no longer process the emotional power of an image. Seeing this succession “blown up” on IMAX, as pixelated as some of the footage may get (that’s not the team’s fault, they did their best remastering what they could, but I assume some archival footage was in too much of a bad shape to be salvaged), felt like we were witnesses to a window the world did not want us to see.
How Macdonald and Rice-Edwards focus on different parts of what they show (notably, Nixon’s face being completely frozen in shock after he signed the 23rd amendment, lowering the voting age from 21 to 18) makes us repurpose further how genuinely divided this country was, and, unfortunately, still is. Because when Lennon goes up on stage, to either sing for the freedom of John Sinclair, who was sentenced to ten years in prison for smoking a joint or heeding his fans to “give peace a chance,” one will undoubtedly look back at this era and ask themselves if the period we’re currently living in got in any way better.
Since we never gave peace a chance, I’ll let you answer this one on your own, but it is crazy how, even fifty years after Nixon, Watergate, and countless politically motivated wars, no matter the number of artists who dared stand up to fight for what is right, nothing has changed. Perhaps John & Yoko paved the way for more artists to do the same, and the One to One concert was especially important in the times they lived in. However, the footage that Macdonald shows makes it clearer than clear that America remains as divided as it ever was, perhaps far more divided now, thanks to the person sitting in the White House at this very moment this review was published.
He isn’t afraid to directly engage with what he’s showing, either implicitly or explicitly, which ultimately makes the audience confront themselves as they are forced to reckon with the consequences of electing politicians who never serve their needs but only think of themselves. In attempting to prevent this disease of endless wars from going further, John Lennon and Yoko Ono stood up and reminded everyone what the world would look like if we all strived for peace and compassion. One to One: John & Yoko may not end up being the most crowd-pleasing documentary made on a band member of The Beatles, and Sam Mendes’ upcoming film centered on the figure will certainly not talk about any of this, at least not at the profound level that Macdonald and Rice-Edwards do here. However, if you do get a chance to see it on an IMAX screen, the chances of you never forgetting it are extremely high.
SCORE: ★★★1/2
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