BBC Warner | 2010 | 90 mins. | NR
As we close in on the 30th anniversary of John Le4nnon’s assassination, it’s only natural that we see some documentaries and movies dealing with his life. On tap today, is the recently released, Lennon: Naked. Directed by Edward Coulthard, and starring Christopher Eccleston (Doctor Who) as the tortured idol, Naked covers 1967-71. In a broad sense, the film covers Lennon’s evolution from famous Beatle to enduring and enigmatic icon. Along the way, writer Robert Jones asserts that his conflicted feelings about his father affected how he approached his entire life.
In 1964 a reluctant John Lennon is persuaded by manager Brian Epstein (Rory Kinnear) to meet Freddie (Christopher Fairbank), the father who abandoned him 17 years earlier, with the press in attendance. The meeting is short and bitter. Three years later, Brian Epstein—John’s closest thing to a father figure—was dead. That entire sequence, Epstein escorting Lennon to meet his father, is shot in stark black & white, which serves to underscore the affect John’s father had on him.
When we shift to color it’s 1967. Lennon is unhappily married to Cynthia (Claudie Blakely), a seemingly uninvolved father to son Julian (Charlie Coulthard) regretting a trip to India to seek spiritual guidance along with his bandmates (who don’t really appear enough to matter) and eventually being seduced by Yoko Ono (Torchwood’s Naoko Mori), with whom he enters into mind-expanding bliss and antiwar crusading, saying he was “a mess before I met you.”
Throughout the film, screenwriter Robert Jones shows flashes of attempting to get at the issues that seemed to plague John. We see moments of inner rage and anguish, and are even taken back to scenes of John at six, being abandoned by his father. However, the film moves so fast that these issues aren’t explored enough to get any real answers.
I will say though, no matter what you might think of Yoko Ono, it’s easy to see why John was captivated by her. While no one would question his genius, Lennon was wounded as a child. It seems to me he hadn’t evolved into adulthood when Ono met him, and she was happy to let him be the child he felt he was never able to be.
As to Eccleston’s performance, though he doesn’t have much of a physical resemblance to John, he does a fairly solid job. The biggest issue with Lennon: Naked is that it manages to skim the surface of several potentially interesting issues, but in the end, never really delves into anything. There are fleeting moments of interest, but ultimately, this is one only for Lennon diehards.
Audio and video look pretty good here. There’s a widescreen presentation that is clear; although there are some scenes that are fairly dark, it’s not debilitating. Audio comes through without difficulty as well.
There are no special features.
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