THE U.S. VS. JOHN LENNON A film review by Steve Rhodes
Copyright 2006 Steve Rhodes
RATING (0 TO ****): ***
THE U.S. VS. JOHN LENNON, by normally television directors David Leaf and John Scheinfeld, sounds like a hard-hitting documentary, given its straight-forward title, however, it's anything but. With plenty of great old John Lennon songs, it is an easy film to enjoy, so much so that its message comes across as a bit too simplistic and unquestioning. It's also significantly mistitled. A much more appropriate title would have been GIVE PEACE A CHANCE, since that was the song that Lennon and his wife Yoko Ono used as the theme song in their crusade to end the war in Vietnam by bringing the American troops home. Only in a twenty minute segment in the last act is there any discussion of any activities by the government to thwart's Lennon's antiwar activism.
We join up with John Lennon in the 1960s, when he is still with the Beatles and is getting into hot water with a large swath of American Christians for claiming that the Beatles were more popular than Jesus. It is a remark he quickly regretted making, since it was so widely misconstrued and because it caused massive burning of their records. Of course, there is nothing better than controversy to increase a celebrities' popularity, so maybe he wasn't really as upset as he claimed.
We see how playful, silly and sweet he was. And, naive as well, one could argue, since he came to embrace dangerous radicals like Angela Davis, Bobby Seale and the Black Panther party who certainly were not of the "let's give peace a change" mold. The documentary successfully makes Noam Chomsky and others like Davis and Seale on the radical left appear mainstream.
Once he joins up with Yoko Ono, the two of them start holding "bed-ins" in which their adoring press are invited to their bedside to be preached to. "We are selling [peace] like soap," he tells the reporters curled up around their bed, "so that housewives say there are only two products, peace or war." Earlier Yoko's spokesman explains that she was a performance artist who always believed that she wasn't being outrageous enough if at least half of the audience didn't walk out during her act. None of the reporters even considered walking out on the John and Yoko show, since at least a hundred more reporters outside in the hall would fight to get in. What the pair said was instant news, worth proclaiming in newspapers around the globe. Ah fame, what a great megaphone it provides.
The documentary uses a mixture of contemporary talking heads, wonderful period songs and good film footage to really put us in the moment. As a grad student in Berkeley in the late 60s and early 70s, this was my era, so it really brought back strong memories for me.
After quickly glossing over the foundations of the war during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, the movie heaps the usual amount of massive scorn on the Nixon administration as being the source of just about all evil in the world.
John Lennon was a foreign national on a visa who caused huge demonstrations against the government at a time of war. The government in return tapped his phone and tried to cancel his visa. One could argue that this should not come as a big surprise. The net result of this was that he successfully kept getting his deportation postponed until the Immigration Service finally gave up and let stay him and get his green card. How was this described by John's friends? "The very fabric of his existence was being threatened by what they were trying to do to him," one explains to us, without realizing for a minute the amount of hyperbole in his summation of the events.
In an unnecessary zinger put in completely out of the blue, the filmmakers let the audience know exactly where their political sentiments lie. One of the very last people they put on the screen is left-wing author Gore Vidal, who says that Presidents Nixon and Bush are both murderers.
But, if you love Lennon's music, as I do, and if you'd like to be transported back to that tumultuous era, the film does this all quite well.
THE U.S. VS. JOHN LENNON runs 1:39. It is rated PG-13 for "some strong language, violent images and drug references" and would be acceptable for kids around 12 and up.
The film opens in limited release in the United States on Friday, September 29, 2006. In the Silicon Valley, it will be showing at the AMC theaters, the Century theaters and the Camera Cinemas.
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