Reinaldo Marcus Green (2024)
Easy watching and listening but that may not be what Reinaldo Marcus Green was after. And my reasons for being mildly positive about Green’s Bob Marley biopic are mostly negative. The rhythm of the Jamaican accents is lovely but the words being spoken are sometimes hard to make out. This might well be protection against ropy dialogue – a suspicion lodged in my mind thanks to a press conference early on, which comes across loud and clear, and consists almost entirely of clichés. The reggae beat of the songs is pleasant, too – almost, for me, lulling. In the concert performances, Kingsley Ben-Adir lip-syncs to Marley’s original recordings[1]; as far as I was concerned, Ben-Adir could have been doing his own singing since I didn’t have a strong sense of Marley’s own voice. (This made for a very different experience from watching, say, Jamie Foxx lip-sync to Ray Charles tracks in Ray (2004).) Although I knew what Bob Marley looked like, he wasn’t a strong image in my head either – and I had no idea of how he moved on stage. Ben-Adir’s Marley is gently charismatic. It was only in the closing credits sequence, accompanied by footage of an actual Marley concert, that I was made aware of the difference between the movement of the man himself and that of the man I’d been watching in Bob Marley: One Love. Compared with the manic, ecstatic real thing, Kingsley Ben-Adir looks rather well behaved.
The screenplay – credited to Terence Winter, Frank E Flowers and Zach Baylin – begins with one peace-promoting concert and ends with another. In 1976, at the height of violent political conflict in Jamaica, Bob Marley plans ‘Smile Jamaica’ in the hope of bringing harmony between warring factions. Before the concert even takes place, Marley, his wife Rita (Lashana Lynch) and other members of his team, including manager Don Taylor (Anthony Welsh), are shot and injured. Marley recovers to go ahead with the concert, where he shows the crowd his bullet wounds. Disillusioned, he heads with his band to London; Rita stays for some time in the US with her children before coming to London too. One Love ends two years later, with a triumphant homecoming to Jamaica and the ‘One Leave Peace Concert’. That final news film shows Marley on the concert stage, joining the hands of the Jamaican prime minister, Michael Manley, and Edward Seaga, Manley’s political arch rival.
Reinaldo Marcus Green’s intervening narrative describes the rapidly increasing international success of Bob Marley’s music, chiefly through his Exodus album – as well as intermittent tensions within Marley’s marriage and entourage, his passion for football, and initial diagnosis of the cancer that would kill him. (The film’s closing legends report his death in May 1981, at the age of thirty-six.) There are a few flashbacks to the hero’s boyhood and teenage years (where he’s played by Nolan Collignon and Quan-Dajai Henrique respectively). There’s often a spark between Kingsley Ben-Adir and Lashana Lynch; both do a good job of conveying the sincerity of their characters’ Rastafari beliefs. Most of the cast seems to follow Ben-Adir’s lead, with relaxed, low-key playing. An exception is James Norton, as Chris Blackwell, the record producer and founder of Island Records. It was a mistake to cast such a strong actor in so thinly written a role: Norton isn’t bad but, with hardly anything to do, seems to be doing too much. When Anthony Welsh’s Don Taylor occasionally delivers an up-to-no-good look, the effect is, similarly, too emphatic.
This adds up to a film that’s likeable, fairly entertaining and thoroughly unsurprising. It is, despite its musical protagonist, an altogether quieter piece of work than Green’s previous screen biography, King Richard (2021). Perhaps this is an expression of reverence for its subject: text on the screen at both ends of the film makes clear enough that One Love is hagiography. There’s a scene during the London exile in which one of the Wailers plays the theme from Otto Preminger’s film Exodus (1960): this apparently gives Marley the idea for writing his album of the same name. Another of the closing legends reports that in 1999 Time magazine named Exodus the best album of the twentieth century. For me, I’m afraid to say, Bob Marley: One Love was musically exciting only when I heard Ernest Gold’s score for the Preminger picture.
21 February 2024
[1] I gather (from a quick Google search) that it’s Ben-Adir’s own voice when Marley sings in less public settings.
