The storms have passed for now, the sun is out, and lovely Nevada County beckons. With Spring not far off, what better time is there to go out to a movie?
Now playing at The Onyx, Nevada City and The Prime Cinemas’ Sutton in Grass Valley, Bob Marley: One Love, a film that celebrates the life of one of the world’s most famous and beloved musicians, the songwriter of “I Shot the Sheriff,” “People Get Ready,” and, of course, “One Love.”
I don’t know a lot about Bob Marley but his songs sound more to me like anthems; epic-sounding calls to action that are filled with infectious rhythms and arrangements whose emotional lyrics inspire listeners to take a stand in favor of love, peace, and justice for all. Marley was a crusader, his music was his weapon, and he stuck to his groove. Many of his songs are deeply spiritual, calling listeners to God through the door of Marley’s own faith, Rastafarianism, an Abrahamic faith centered in Jamaica but with strong links to Africa.
The movie opens with an introduction featuring Marley’s son, Ziggy, who thanks us for watching. He then goes on to insist that he and the Markey family have made sure that everything that follows is “authentic.” With such a heavy thumb on the scale, the film’s agenda, keeping the Marley legacy alive, is clear, though little else is.
We’re then shown a long crawl laying out the background of Jamaican politics in 1976. The British had departed the former colony in 1962. Yet, as seems to happen with decolonization, things have fallen apart, the center no longer holds, and chaos has rushed in to fill the vacuum. The young island nation is wrestling with political and gangland factions that threaten civil war.
Finally, the movie starts. Marley (Kingsley Ben-Adir), backed by his band the Wailers, is already immensely popular in Jamaica. He’s been planning his “Smile Concert,” a major music festival in collaboration with the Jamaican government. Marley’s hope is to unite the country’s warring factions through music, but his good intentions and pure heart are poor shields, as shown when an afternoon frolic with his boys at the neighborhood soccer field is disrupted by a gangland shootout, forcing them all to dive for cover before fleeing home to his compound.
Two nights before the concert, hired thugs sneak into his compound and shoot Marley, two of his associates, and his wife, Rita (Lashana Lynch), whose dreadlocks deflect the bullet. Though they all survive, Marley’s concert plans suffer a near-fatal wound. Marley defiantly lets the show go on, but he walks off in anger after showing the crowd the wounds left by the bungled murder attempt.
Understandably fearful and frustrated, Marley decides it’s time to leave Jamaica for someplace where he can make his music in peace. He sends his Rita and their children to the United States while he and his band, with the enthusiastic support of manager and producer Chris Blackwell (James Norton), try their luck in England where new, rawer pop artists, including punk rock bands like The Clash, are elbowing aside memories of the music of the 1960s.
England proves to be rich soil for Marley’s artistic dreams. Compared to Jamaica, it’s a peaceful paradise, but episodes of racism and rejection occur. With space to work as he pleases and not having to dodge bullets, Marley, a blindingly sunny optimist, blossoms. Inspired by, of all things, Ernest Gold’s score for the film Exodus (1960), he and his band create what some call his finest work, Exodus, the album that made him a worldwide phenomenon.
Drama flares up now and then. Rita’s arrival in England leads to arguments and accusations of mutual infidelity. The movie tries to show the darker side of Marley, such as his strict hand with musicians in the recording studio. His discovery that his accountant, Don Taylor (Anthony Welsh) has been paying bribes in his efforts to get Marley a concert date in Africa leads him to subject the man to a beat down. There are also scenes when Marley proselytizes on behalf of Rastafarianism, but no one pushes back against him, even in the slightest. (Who could argue with such a good guy?) It skips to and fro through his life, with glimpses of his early abandonment by his white father and the moment when he first picked up the guitar.
Finally, Marley experiences the first symptom of the melanoma that will eventually lead to his death. But the music lives on. There’s no mourning in this film, which ends on a flourish of reggae triumph, with concert footage of the real Bob Marley singing his heart out; by his faith and in the eyes of his fans, he remains God’s Rastafarian messenger of love and peace. “Let’s join together and a-feel alright,” as the song goes. To think otherwise is to be a grouch.
There are numerous documentaries about Bob Marley. This film would be better off in that format than in this factual fiction, co-written and directed by Reinaldo Marcus Green (under the supervision of the Marley family). It’s much more a celebration of his life than a portrait of it. No really hard questions arise here—did Marley’s efforts in Jamaica actually help bring peace in the country? How much can we expect from art politically, especially these days?
Green does do a good job as director. He and cinematographer Robert Elswit bathe their images in rich nostalgic color, with some great images, among them a dream sequence of young Marley (Nolan Collignon) fleeing a burning field of sugar cane and a phantom on horseback.
The film has the problems associated with biopics. It feels thrown together into a formless highlight reel of Marley’s life, hurrying to cover as much ground as possible in its two-hour running time. No sooner does it put its toe into one aspect of Marley’s life than it skips off to another. Marley seems a mosaic of mostly great and only a few bad things, a confusing idealized portrait that will please die-hard fans, but may puzzle those new to Marley.
The performances are all good with Kingsley Ben-Adir doing a fine job of capturing Marley’s boyish, joyful charm. Yet, the filmmaker’s goal of creating a fine-grained realistic portrait of Marley and his Jamaican milieu runs into the problem of comprehension. Most of the dialogue is in Jamaican dialect, which sounds lovely, but honestly, this non-Jamaican missed much of it. The use of subtitles may well help fill in the many holes of this scattered film. In that, I suspect I’m not alone. But at least there was the music to keep me smiling, as it will you.
Thomas Burchfield’s short story “McCain Takes a Bullet” was a runner-up in last year’s Gold Country Writers’ Short Story Contest; his short story, “McCain, the Stranger” is in the online version of Mystery Tribune. His article “Noir or Not?: Straw Dogs” is in the current issue of Noir City magazine. A freelance editor, he’s also the author of the short story “Lucky Day” in the anthology Berkeley Noir (Akashic Press 2020), He’s also the author of Butchertown (Ambler House 2017), a ripping, 1920s gangster thriller and the award-winning contemporary vampire novel Dragon’s Ark. He reviews movies regularly on Medium and may be found on Facebook.