When the lights go down and “Bob Marley: One Love” begins, audiences are treated to the smiling face of Ziggy Marley, the singer’s son and a producer on the film. He delivers a brief message about how much love and care went into this picture, perhaps anticipating fears the viewer might have that this story would be told without the tacit approval of the subject’s loved ones.
The film follows Bob Marley in the last five years of his life, between a failed assassination attempt in 1976 and his death from a rare strain of skin cancer in 1981. To portray the legendary reggae artist “King Richard,” director Reinaldo Marcus Green turned to actor Kingsley Ben-Adir. Focusing primarily on the recording of the album “Exodus,” “One Love” is an inoffensive celebration of Marley’s music and his enduring influence. It doesn’t overstay its welcome. It doesn’t make a mockery of someone many consider to have been a great man. But, most importantly, it is utterly without dramatic ambition and seems to exist only to spike streams of Marley’s songs for the next several months before the film settles into a lifetime of reruns on the TNT Network.
Toothless and forgettable musical biopics are no new phenomenon. But it’s not just creatively bankrupt studio executives at fault here or the unadventurous filmmakers they hire to make these pictures. It’s often the estates of these deceased icons who possess a vested interest in ensuring any movie about these famous figures doesn’t rankle diehard fans, doesn’t complicate itself with the thorny particulars of their lives, and, most importantly, leaves audiences wanting to go listen to more of those classic tunes. The remaining members of Queen ensured “Bohemian Rhapsody” would be a showcase for their songcraft more than a meaningful exploration of Freddie Mercury’s life. Even when the subjects are still alive, like Ice Cube and Dr. Dre with “Straight Outta Compton,” their backstage involvement allows them to steer the storytellers away from engaging with whatever elements of their past they’d rather not be picked apart by modern society.
There’s a scene in “One Love,” late in the second act, where Marley confronts his wife Rita (Lashana Lynch) for talking to another man at a party in Paris. He exclaims that he knows about her having another man she sees back home in Jamaica. She fights back by alluding to the fact that she is raising their children, including the ones he’s had with other women. Up to this point in the film, their relationship is presented as a matter of fact, with little to no hints that there is any strife between them. The script certainly expends no energy exploring the fact that Marley had multiple children by multiple other women throughout his time with Rita. If there’s any ambiguity on the type of movie this is, that scene is immediately followed up by a montage set to “No Woman, No Cry.”
The script certainly expends no energy exploring the fact that Marley had multiple children by multiple other women throughout his time with Rita.
Outside of the scenes where the audience can forget the narrative at play and lose themselves in lip-sung renditions of Marley’s most famous songs, there’s very little here to grab hold of. As far as the movie is concerned, Marley is not a particularly complicated or fascinating figure. Despite being from Jamaica and living in a politically tumultuous time, he repeatedly insists he is not political or concerned with politics. Committed instead to the film’s vague abstraction of Rastafari idealism, he’s just a guy who wants everyone to get along, loves smoking weed, and is all about the music.
There are broad gestures implying he, like every famous musician in a biopic, was in some way corrupted by fame and success, but the film doesn’t take those accusations seriously. Rita tells him that when “you swim in pollution, you get polluted.” But it never takes the time to show us ways in which Marley has changed, besides being open to going to parties for rich people. He runs away from the strife and violence in his homeland to record an album he deems a vital message the world needs to hear, just to turn down a peace concert back home and tour those songs in Sweden and France. Obviously, by the film’s end, he does decide to do that peace concert, but the decision to do so feels arbitrary. Even if that’s the historical sequence of events, it feels dramatically perfunctory.
There are broad gestures implying he, like every famous musician in a biopic, was in some way corrupted by fame and success, but the film doesn’t take those accusations seriously.
It’s always felt unfortunate that Bob Marley, a complicated man, seems to have been reduced to a near caricature in popular culture by the white stoners who decorate their dorm rooms with his poster. So, it feels even more regrettable that a film about his life, co-signed by his progeny, doesn’t want to risk making anyone uncomfortable by potentially bursting that bubble for the people who still buy his greatest hits in droves.
“One Love” is fine if you want to pay for an infomercial advertising Marley’s music, but it is an absolute waste of time for anyone hungering for much more.
“One Love” is fine if you want to pay for an infomercial advertising Marley’s music, but it is an absolute waste of time for anyone expecting or hungering for much more.
“Bob Marley: One Love” is currently playing at The Senator.