The small color TV that graced the Bank Street apartment John Lennon and Yoko Ono shared in Greenwich Village from 1971 to 1973 was perched at the end of the bed, a few inches from their toes. We know this not just from historical photographs but because in the new documentary One to One: John & Yoko, the filmmakers have built an exacting replica of the place—complete with Snoopy pillowcases—without even bothering to tidy it up. Butts smolder in an overstuffed ashtray while steam drifts off coffee half drunk in a blue Anthora, as if the pair are on a cigarette run and will be back in a jiff.
|
ONE TO ONE: JOHN & YOKO ★★★1/2 (3.5/4 stars) |
Between its recreation of that Greenwich Village apartment, its use of archival audio recordings of telephone conversations and its fuzzed-out cutaways to vintage TV clips, One to One—which opens this week in IMAX and includes footage of the One to One benefit concert that Lennon and Ono staged at Madison Square Garden in August of 1972—often feels more like a museum installation than journalism. But its subject and its music would reward either.
Co-directed by Scottish filmmaker Kevin Macdonald—an Oscar winner for One Day in September, the 1999 documentary about the murder of Israeli athletes during the 1972 Munich Olympics—One to One posits that the stuff pouring out of Lennon and Ono’s TV set was more than just time-wasting entertainment. It seeped deep into the consciousness of the newly married and voraciously curious pair, filling their days with images of John-Boy Walton and Tony the Tiger.
When they weren’t vegging out in front of the telly, Lennon and Ono were devising ways to implement a radical rock & roll agenda with his new friends on the American Left, like anti-war activist Jerry Rubin, while simultaneously dodging the FBI. Nixon’s weaponized government had the pair so under the microscope that, to the filmmakers’ boon, Lennon started documenting his own telephone calls so he would have a record of what the feds were likely taping themselves.
In one such recording, Lennon refers to himself as “a revolutionary artist.” This may be the ultimate question that One to One posits: can an individual rightfully consider themselves members of the revolution while regularly catching The Price is Right?
It depends on what else you’re flipping to, I suppose. In addition to steady inundations of Vietnam War atrocities from the desk of Walter Cronkite, Lennon and Ono caught a segment from then WABC‐TV news reporter Geraldo Rivera on Staten Island’s Willowbrook State School, and the horrifying conditions for the intellectually disabled students who lived there.
This led to August 30, 1972’s legendary One to One benefit concert. Lennon’s only full-length show after leaving The Beatles not only provides Macdonald and co-director and editor Sam Rice-Edwards with their film’s title, but the remastered footage—with the music newly remixed by the film’s executive producer Sean Ono Lennon—is the film’s chief selling point as well as its primary reason for existence.
The music sounds incredible—there’s not nearly enough, in my estimation. This mix is streets ahead of the comparatively muddy one found on the 1986 album Live in New York City. (This time out, “Woman is the N***** of the World” is tastefully omitted.) Seeing the many close-ups of the bespectacled Lennon delivering his ragged and emotionally raw vocals on an IMAX screen twice the size of that Greenwich Village flat is positively soul-shaking.
That said, much of One to One feels more like an exhibit than an investigation. There are no signs, for example, of Lennon’s growing alcohol dependency and drug addiction, nor the discordance in the couple’s relationship that would lead to the “Lost Weekend,” the title Lennon gave to the debaucherous year-and-half he spent away from his wife starting in late 1973. May Pang, Lennon’s lover and the central figure in that much chronicled episode, shows up in voice only. As Ono’s longtime assistant, she is recorded on the phone diligently and somewhat comically trying to procure thousands of houseflies for one of Ono’s fabled art exhibitions.
But no matter: there is no shortage of warts-and-all renderings of the most complicated, confounding, and frustratingly short-lived Beatle: the documentary Lost Weekend: A Love Story came out three years ago while Borrowed Time: Lennon’s Last Decade was released earlier this year.
Macdonald and Rice-Edwards have instead pieced together something of even greater value: more than a piece of mere reportage, they have crafted a true experience. This is “history is a confusion”—a lyric from Lennon’s “Watching the Wheels” (a song he did not play that hot August night in midtown)—turned into a thrilling, radical theme park ride.
