Director: Reinaldo Marcus Green (USA). Year of Release: 2024
Kingston, Jamaica, 1976. It’s the run up to the Smile Jamaica Concert, which has been organised as a response to growing violence on the streets. At a press conference, journalists ask Bob Marley whether he’s going to appear. Doesn’t playing the concert put his own life at risk? Marley replies with some evasive comments about the power of Love and Rastafari, but confirms that yes, he will be performing.
Later, Marley is hanging around with his entourage. Wife Rita heads home to sort out some stuff. While she’s still in the car park, we see 2 men rush past. One of the men shoots her in the head. They enter the house, where one of them confronts a bare-chested Bob. They stare at each other for a few seconds, as the man deliberates. Finally, he shoots the singer in the chest. It is one of the least dramatic shootings ever committed to film.
Fortunately, there’s no harm done to Marley, and Rita is saved by the bullet hitting her dreadlocks. Bob’s manager Don takes a few bullets, but he’s also ok. Two days later, Marley takes to the stage at the Smile concert. In the press conference leading up to the concert, Marley utters mainly mystical religious statements, but he does say that no government in the world in the world is legitimate, even if he justifies this by saying that we are all subjects to Emperor Haile Selassi.
So far, we have been largely presented with Hippy Bob, more interested in love and Rastafarianism than in politics. This is one Marley for sure, but not The Marley. Marley’s songs were not just about Love and being nice to each other. Many of them were also about resistance. When he performs the festival, At first he is unsure which song he is going to start with. After a dramatic pause, he starts singing:
Until the philosophy which hold one race
Superior and another Inferior
Is finally
And permanently
Discredited
And abandoned
Everywhere is war
Me say war
That until there are no longer
First-class and second-class citizens of any nation
Until the colour of a man’s skin
Is of no more significance than the colour of his eyes
Me say war
War is my favourite Marley song, and not just because of its militancy. It is about as far as you can get from the sanitised peaceful Marley who was used to sell millions of copies of the Legend greatest hits CD. And yet the way it is used in the film reinforces his manufactured toothless image. After singing words calling on people to resist injustice, the Marley in the film calls on the audience to love each other and subject themselves to religious mysticism.
The film, which was produced by various members of the Marley family, proceeds in the same sense of political impotence and lack of any possible controversy. Realising that things are getting too dangerous in Jamaica, Bob flees to London, while Rita takes the kids to his mother in Delaware. We learn some titbits about Marley’s development in flashback scenes which are much more confusing than if the film had just been shown in chronological order.
It is as if someone opened a biography at random pages and wrote about what appeared on each page. Things happen, and then we hear nothing more about them. We certainly don’t learn what connects these seemingly unrelated events. Bob goes to see the Clash in a bar. He gets picked up by the police in London and spends the night in a cell. His manager tries to skim off extra cash. All incidents from his life, sure, hut we are never shown why these particular events are important.
Some other scenes, straight out of “Writing Biopics for Dummies”, clumsily attempt to show us the creative process. Marley hears the guys playing the soundtrack of Otto Preminger’s film Exodus downstairs. After a brief strum on his guitar, he comes down. One by one the musicians start playing, and soon they have something which sounds surprizingly like the final released version of the song. As with other scenes, this tells a story but does not offer us any enlightenment.
The film ends with the One Love Peace concert, once more in Kingston, this time in 1978. As the final credits roll, we see photos of the real event, where Marley held hands with presidential candidates Michael Manley and Edward Seaga (the latter of whom was probably funded by the CIA). None of this appears in the film itself, nor does much of the music from the concert, presumably because they would be too interesting within such a lacklustre film.
I don’t resent the depoliticisation of Marley as much as the way he has been relieved of any personality at all. In the film, he is charismatic, sure, but in as inoffensive way as possible. He is not allowed to hold any opinions, certainly none which might be remotely controversial. In presenting a Marley who they think will be acceptable to everyone, the film makers have created a character who us not interesting to anyone.
How might a film about Bob Marley have been interesting? Well, it could have explained how Marley became an icon of the Black Lives Matter movement after the police murder of George Floyd. It could have looked at his status as a beacon to people in Africa and the Caribbean in the years following decolonisation. Or it could have just shown a little curiosity into the man’s life. There is none of that here. All we are left with is the music which, great as it is, is no substitute.
There is an interesting analysis which says that as multinationals diversify their portfolios, biopics are made to sell a singer’s greatest hits album in the same way that Comic Book here films are used to sell plastic toys. Of course these are not the only reasons, but it helps explain the conservatism of both the soundtrack and content of most recent biopics. Viewing the Clash would be a great opportunity to play Punky Reggae Party but that’s only on the deluxe edition of Legend.
Bob Marley – One Love is like a film about John Lennon which ignores his flirtation with the International Marxist Group and Irish Republican politics, and concentrates entirely on the dirge Imagine. You might be excused such a lack of interest in the lead character’s opinions if this were the Chris Martin story, but this is Bob Marley, for Christ’s sake. The film has no inquisitive or apparent interest in its subject. Any heavy lifting ls left to us. But apart from that, it’s fine.
CinePhil 