Bob Marley: One Love

dir: Reinaldo Marcus Green

2024

Hmm. Well. That was a movie.

Bob Marley: One Love is a film about an epileptic hamster living on a musical brick taken from one of the Egyptian pyramids placed on an ice volcano on one of the many moons of Jupiter painted silver and gold, silver and gold…

Nah, I might be fibbing.

It’s about a couple of years in the life of global reggae superstar Bob Marley. And they’re not even the good ones.

I guess, for people of a certain age, not only was Bob Marley a household name for the longest time, depending on your household, but there was also a time when every CD collection had to have, by law, a copy of his greatest hits compilation Legend. I didn’t make the rules, I just abided by them.

Every share house in Melbourne had a copy of it, at least one. These days, of course, there are few CD collections not shoved away somewhere in some dusty corner, and even less share houses in Melbourne. But Legend still gets millions of streams a day on whatever streaming service you can think of. Many of those songs still get played on greatest hits / golden oldie radio every day.

It’s not for me to talk about the man’s music or legacy, because, honestly, who the fuck cares about my opinion about Bob Marley? It’s like, yes I know, no-one should care about my opinions about anything (that isn’t about the sacred and divine medium of cinema!) But, like, I haven’t expressed my opinions about The Beatles, orange juice, the Eiffel Tower, the Mona Lisa or Mount Everest recently, either.

My hot take, by the way, is that they’re all shit / overrated, but that’s by the by. Anyone who has listened to popular music over the last forty years has heard all of these songs a million times, so you either like them and are filled with a warm, gooey feeling whenever they come up, or you’re coldly indifferent to them. Which means it’s doubly unlikely that you are reading a review about a film you’ll never watch.

Kingsley Ben-Adair plays Bob here, and he’s not Jamaican, which you could think is their first mistake in making this flick, but he makes a good go of it anyway. He gives the Jamaican patois / accent a red hot go, and, honestly, it’s one of those things that works when the sentence is short, and falls apart when the sentence is too long by the end of it. It’s terrible and endearing to behold. He’s an intense actor who is very good at bringing that intensity to the fore in his performances, but it’s often deployed bizarrely in several scenes, in a way that is baffling, sometimes. He can imitate many of Marley’s tics and mannerisms, but he never really looked or felt like Bob to me, whether at rest or in motion. Ever. Not in any scene, really.

I never “believed” he was Bob, and that’s kind of a fatal flaw in a biopic, and nor did he ever create, for me, an interesting enough simulacra to venture forth with in an alternate direction (unlike the film I saw before this, being Back to Black and its treatment of Amy Winehouse and the central performance of Marisa Abela.

Lashana Lynch, who is also British but from a Jamaican background, does a lot better with the patois, in playing Bob’s long suffering wife and backup singer Rita, but also strains under the weight of a film that doesn’t know what to do with her, for most of its running length. It culminates in a contrived scene where Bob and Rita fight outside of a French nightclub, because of his jealousy over seeing her talking with someone, but then you remember Bob had kids with something like 30 other women, not including all the kids he had with Rita, and you think, where the fuck is this coming from? Is it something that actually happened, or something put together because someone on the production side thought “well, we need a show-reel scene for the awards circuit, of the main actors having an utterly contrived fight in order to get them sweet, sweet statues”?

You fools, this was never going to get awards. Even if they have people saying cringy lines of dialogue using song titles or lyrics from Bob Marley and the Wailers songs. Even if they were riding high on the idea that the last time this director drilled for awards oil, they struck paydirt with the mostly terrible King Richard as an unearned tribute to the father of Venus and Serena Williams, given of course to notorious face slapper Will Smith, that wasn’t going to work this time. That film at least conjectured that had not their father been such a piece of shit, two of the greatest players in tennis never would have achieved what they achieved.

This flick conjectures, conjures, raises, suggests nothing, beyond that Bob Marley was a really good musician and singer, a shitty husband, and that the only one of his kids that he ever thought about or asked after was Ziggy. I guess it was a sheer coincidence that Ziggy is one of the film’s producers.

Bob has a central trauma, like all musicians in musician biopics, and it’s related to being rejected by his father (on a horse) as a child, but there’s also something about a burning sugar cane field, and maybe he stubbed his toe running away from the fire? He remembers the poverty he grew up in, and it’s also replicated in the repetition of those scenes I just mentioned, which are repeated ad nauseum, but with no escalating sense of their importance, or explanation, or their relevance just because it’s intercut with scenes of Bob looking lost / confused / flatulent.

We see scenes of violence in the streets of Trenchtown, and we are told it is political violence because of an upcoming election, but there is a concert we are told Bob wants to perform at on the eve of the election, but no-one else thinks it’s a good idea. It seems important, though, so important, that when gunmen burst into his compound and kill a bunch of people, and shoot his wife, and shoot him, he still goes on stage anyway.

He is overwhelmed with visions of his shooter, who he keeps seeing in the crowd. But he doesn’t wish revenge or violence upon his attacker: He wishes just through squinting his smoky eyes at him that the gunman would have reconsidered his actions, his anger, his life.

Bob leaves the stage after a song, after showing the bullet wound, and leaves Jamaica.

Wait, what? In reality they played like 12 songs. The crowd may have wanted encores, but they weren’t exactly ripped off or nothing.

For me these events of these years don’t seem like strange ones to reiterate, because I have at least a tiny bit of background info, having read a book called A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James, and like a lot of fictionalised histories, carefully goes through a lot of the events depicted in the flick with details, and invents most of the dialogue.

This flick, which doesn’t have the luxury of fiction, refers to the events, doesn’t give a lot of reasons as to why they’re important or why we should care about them, and doesn’t invent interesting dialogue to go along with them.

The Bob created here swears allegiance to Jah, to Ras Tafari, makes many references to the Ethiopian / African motherland, talks about redemption, revolution, freedom; makes mention of Marcus Garvey, but never tells us or an audience surrogate what they matter to him and why they should matter to us. This Bob cares naught for money or wealth, but viciously attacks one of his band’s managers / promoters (Anthony Welsh) when he sees him getting an envelope of money.

Like, what do you have against envelopes full of money? The envelope didn’t do anything to you.

To say that the character isn’t really convincingly put across, or consistently realised would seem… strange. I mean, there’s literally thousands of hours of recorded footage of him performing, being interviewed, all sorts of stuff in real life, and you’d think they’d be able to find enough to cobble together a character with traits and attributes, but I honestly can’t tell you anything about him other than he seemed to really like banging random women (offscreen, thankfully), and he was pretty mean to the Wailers.

The best scene in the whole flick involves the first time a young Bob, then Robert, and the Wailers try to get a recording deal with a gun toting lunatic running his own studio. That scene (which, tellingly, doesn’t include the adult version of Bob) tells us more about Bob and the band, who desperately cobble together something lest they get shot, and come up with a track Simmer Down that has the producer jumping for joy.

Did it actually happen like that? Who knows or cares? It’s at least enjoyable, and has a strong energy to it absent from a lot of the other scenes, including ones of performance.

The film curiously doesn’t really give us much by way of saying why these particular years, leading up to his cancer diagnosis, mattered most compared to the rest of his life, or why the emphasis on the other Unity concert mattered, or touring Africa mattered so much. Marley is treated very much like a crazy / holy man who said whatever he said for whatever reasons, and everyone, absolutely everyone went along with it because he was Bob. Sometimes a biopic is way more enjoyable than a doco, but all I could think of watching this, especially at the end when they use ‘real’ footage, is how much more illuminating any doco would have been than this overacted, underwritten mess.

5 times musical biopics should always include the line “the wrong kid died” or GTFO out of 10

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“Sometimes the messenger has to become the message.” – let’s get together and condemn this film to feel all right - Bob Marley: One Love