Reinaldo Marcus Green’s Bob Marley: One Love focuses primarily on Marley’s (Kingsley Ben-Adir) life between 1976 and 1978, during which time the reggae legend fled Jamaica for London and his homeland was plagued by rampant violence and political upheaval. One might think that this limited scope would allow the filmmakers to explore this era of Marley’s life with some measure of specificity, whether in the challenges his marriage faced as his wife, Rita (Lashana Lynch), spent much of this time in America and Jamaica, or how the fractured state of his homeland and his love for its people informed his landmark 1977 album, Exodus. But Green’s shaggy, disjointed film is less interested in the complexities of Marley’s personal or professional life than it is in presenting him as a hero and an inspiration.
One Love’s hagiographic bent is symptomatic of the modern-day biopic, but the shapelessness of the film’s narrative structure is an even greater hindrance than its fawning tone. It’s hard to know whether to blame this on the meandering editing or the fact that the film has four credited screenwriters. Either way, the end result leaves One Love feeling like the product of an exquisite corpse game, with jarring flashbacks appearing haphazardly throughout, and numerous transitions and time jumps occurring without the necessary foundation of character motivation or historical context in order for us to understand how or why we get from point A to point B.
The film’s first hour presents Marley and his wife’s marriage as a perfect, joyful union, with Rita serving as one of the singers in the Wailers. Then, suddenly, Marley becomes jealous when he sees Rita talking with another man in a club, and after she storms outside, they get into a heated argument about Marley’s marital indiscretions. It’s clearly an attempt by the filmmakers to at least acknowledge his infidelity, but it comes out of nowhere in One Love. And it’s dismissed just as quickly, when, soon after, Rita says it’s “water under the bridge” as she and Marley try to schedule a tour in Africa and organize the famed One Love Peace Concert in Jamaica.
As Green’s film almost immediately veers away from the one controversial aspect of Marley it bothers to mention, Rita dutifully returns to the role of supportive wife who’s in awe of her husband’s talent. And in attempting to inspire this same sense of awe in the audience, One Love engages in a parade of well-worn biopic tropes that effectively grind the film to a halt.
Chief among those are the scenes where both music publicist Howard Bloom (Michael Gandolfini) and Island Records producer Chris Blackwell (James Norton) eat their words when Marley’s ideas successfully defy tried-and-true industry practices. And we’re also treated to a hackneyed montage of Marley’s 1977 European tour showing him meeting various celebrities followed by shots of streams of fans hastily grabbing copies of Exodus off the shelf.
In a flashback to the ’60s, we even witness a “this kid’s really got something!” moment when a Jamaican producer hears Marley and his band playing a future early hit of theirs. And, predictably, an image from Marley’s childhood recurs throughout One Love—of a burning field and his absent white father on horseback—that hints an early trauma, but as the film never engages with that memory in any deeper way, the dreamy image remains an empty signifier.
One Love is most effective when its focus is on the music itself. One of the film’s few compelling scenes finds the Wailers leisurely hanging out at home and beginning a jam session when Marley announces that he has an idea for a song. Each member of the band gradually joins in and we hear the skeleton of what would become “Exodus.” As if taking a breath, the film luxuriates in this moment, never stretching credulity by having them end up anywhere near the final version of the song, instead presenting what feels like an authentic representation of collective creativity. Would that the rest of One Love channeled this more relaxed, vibe-heavy tone, rather than leaning further and further into the broadest representations of Marley’s message of unity and peace in order to double-underline his legendary status.
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Bit surprised no reviews of this have picked up on Marley being played by an English guy.
Kingsley Ben-Adir’s background is less of an issue than the script and screenplay being composed by four writers with NO longterm relationship with Jamaica nor any informed familiarity with Jamaican culture. Despite some of the approbation that has been aimed at Ben-Adir online by bloggers seeking clickbait accumulation, Jamaicans have fewer problems with the accents adopted by Ben-Adir and Lashanna Lynch than with the woeful dialogue provided for them by screenplay writers who have evidently hardly spent any time amongst Jamaicans and, therefore, lack conversance with the cadence and rhythm (and also alliteration) that are part and parcel of verbal exchanges between Jamaicans.
With source material as compelling as the real life saga this movie’s plot is based upon, it seems criminal that this film should sag in the middle in the manner that it does and seemingly fall off the edge at the climax.
I believe it was courageous to attempt tell a Marley story which didn’t simply rely on laundry listing his romantic liaisons, nor pander to his public image as a poster child for hedonism, but by avoiding any analysis the CIA may have had in several assassination attempts and the failure to include one or two Jamaicans in the screenplay cipher, means that director Reinaldo Marcus Green shoots both over the bar and wide of the goal and what could have been a classic of the biopic genre, instead serves as Sunday afternoon teatime cuddle fodder.