What went wrong with Bob Marley: One Love?
CBC
Ziggy Marley's movie is not receiving the love its name calls for.
Despite the fact that Bob Marley: One Love was, Ziggy says, a labour of love, a slew of negative reviews and limp early box office numbers have already poured in.
That biopic tells the story of his father, the legendary Jamaican reggae artist who helped to cement both the genre and the closely associated Rastafari religion in the public consciousness. And while Bob died over 40 years ago from melanoma, it took until 2018 for Ziggy and the Marley family to arrive at a time, and land on a script, that gave them a reason to tell his story.
"What we want to do is bring the audience inside of Bob world," Ziggy said in an interview with CBC News ahead of the film's premiere. "You don't have to read it in a book or see it in an interview … they in on the inner circle now."
He went on to say a line repeated in many interviews — that the purpose of making One Love was to share his father's message of unity. A message of universal camaraderie that transformed him, and his wildly popular music, into an enduring symbol of social justice around the world.
"Bob's music, his message, it's what we grew up on," director Reinaldo Marcus Green told CBC. "I think Ziggy said it best: 'Bob wasn't a perfect man, but he had a perfect purpose.' I think that that's what this film's about."
The way they went about that was to go through a specific period in Bob's life with a fine-tooth comb. The film focuses on a few years near the end of the musician's life, when he left a home country falling toward a possible civil war, and crafted Exodus — declared by Time magazine in 1999 to be the greatest album of the 20th century.
It also included various members of the Marley family (who have since expanded the mythos surrounding Bob into a slew of products, documentaries and podcast appearances) advising on set — coaching British actor Kingsley Ben-Adir on everything from his accent, to how many steps Bob would typically skip when walking up the stairs.
Unfortunately for its creators, that hyper-attention to supposed accuracy did not translate to glowing critical reception, with nearly all the criticisms reflecting on the Christ-like depiction of its central star.
"[T]his is a reverent Hallmark Channel-type film made with the family's co-operation," reads a review from the Guardian. "There's hardly a relative here without an associate producer credit — and of course it has all the musical rights."
The Washington Posts' response had a similar gripe; complaining One Love contains "an effort to render Marley's story in more messianic terms: His music, we're told, was not just something to get high to … but a gospel-like message of unity, peace and love."
And Variety puts it simply: "the Marley we see is close to a saint … One Love flirts with complexity but slides into the banality of hero worship."
It was a familiar strategy to recent biopics Big George Foreman, Elvis and Maestro. Both Foreman and Elvis were films aided by their subjects or subjects' families, and criticized for an overly simplistic and glowing depiction of their star that ignored complex, humanizing aspects to protect their legacy.
For Foreman, it was an emphasis on the boxers' born-again Christian life, and an under-representation of his self-hatred after losing to Muhammad Ali — as well as the years-in-the-desert selling George Foreman-branded grills. In Elvis, it was a "pack of lies" (according to The Telegraph) that sanded down controversial aspects of the performer's life to avoid offending his fans (according to Seattle Times) — indicative of a tradition in music biopics that, the New York Times' Popcast argued, necessarily simplifies legendary musicians to turn them into main characters, and heroes.
