>>REVIEW
THE U.S. VS. JOHN LENNON
WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY: David Leaf and John Scheinfeld
Opens Friday, December 15
Uptown Screen
If The U.S. vs. John Lennon settles anything, it is that while Yoko Ono may be epically annoying, she cannot be blamed for John Lennon’s evolution, or devolution into a long-haired, wide-eyed activist. The former mop top’s simplistic pacifism was nothing exceptional, but his elementary social activism coupled with the millions of dollars and millions more fans allowed him to make the world his pulpit.
In fact, while its title and introduction suggest the film is an exploration of the Nixon administration’s harassment of Lennon as an anti-war demonstrator, co-writers/directors David Leaf and John Scheinfeld spend more than two-thirds of this VH1 roc-doc focusing on the "why" of Lennon’s activism long before they begin showing the "how."
Unfortunately, the "why" isn’t very compelling.
Almost all the people in Lennon’s world are hyperbolic stereotypes – tabloid newsmen asking asinine questions and a government hell-bent on stifling an ex-Beatle and the most reviled love interest in the history of Western pop culture. If there is one participant in the drama who comes off as anything more than a one-dimensional zealot, it is former Nixon staffer G. Gordon Liddy.
One of the film’s interviewees, his recollection of lighting a cigar with a peace demonstrator’s candle, declaring that they had finally done something useful, cuts straight through the conceit of Lennon’s political ideology. In "Give Peace a Chance," the ersatz theme song of the anti-war movement, Lennon declared: "All we are saying is give peace a chance." Exactly. As a workable solution, "give peace a chance" doesn’t provide much instruction, but its repetition makes up the bulk of the film.
Lennon’s public statements, even when selected with Leaf and Scheinfeld’s boundless reverence, rarely come off as anything other than pat maxims delivered from the pulpit of a multi-millionaire with a freshly developed social conscience. Even as a jab against the intrusive media, the idea of a "sleep-in" as a public protest is so intrinsically lazy that Lennon’s being taken seriously is mind-boggling. And yet, reporters and the Nixon administration repeatedly did, affording Lennon a profile too high to be ignored.
That Leaf and Scheinfeld spend so little time on Lennon’s harassment by the government isn’t surprising. Though the absurdity of the government’s petty attack makes for compelling drama, it all ends rather anticlimactically with Nixon’s Watergate debacle and the Vietnam War’s unexplored end.
Blame it on the filmmakers, blame it on the American government, or just blame it on Lennon’s grating idealism. Yoko comes out ahead, and that’s never a good sign. |
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