From the moment he rashly remarked that the Beatles had become more popular than Jesus to the instant of his murder in 1980 in New York, John Lennon divided the public, sometimes violently. The U.S.
vs. John Lennon fans some of those flames as it recounts the great rock singercomposer?s battles to avoid deportation in the 1970s.
People who love Lennon will almost certainly like the film; his detractors will almost certainly howl "bias! Even so, the movie, at its best, makes you ache with the memory of an anguished era and its fallen pop-culture hero. The U.
S. vs. John Lennon focuses on the "smart Beatle?
s four-year battle, from 1972 to 1976, to win his green card and prevent deportation. Included are more than 30 interviews (Gore Vidal, Angela Davis, Walter Cronkite, G. Gordon Liddy and Yoko Ono, among them) and 40 Lennon songs.
The musical underscore ? the film?s most powerful element ?
includes Imagine, Peace, Revolution, Mother, Beautiful Boy and Watching the Wheels. Those songs form a kind of musical-spiritual autobiography of Lennon?s evolution into a public anti-war activist and the government harassment that followed.
It was a campaign, the movie reveals, that might have been suggested first by Sen. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina and carried out with a vengeance by the administrations of Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. The movie is full of sympathy for Lennon and his widow, Ono, who granted the filmmakers supposedly "unprecedented access to her archives.
And it?s full of scorn for the government?s harassing crusade against them.
Perhaps this documentary by David Leaf and John Scheinfeld is a bit too idolatrous, not of Lennon as a great rock poet (who deserves it) but of Lennon as a presumed radical saint. The movie could use more of the yearning and power of Lennon?s own anthem Imagine or the self-questioning of Jealous Guy.
As the movie?s many heads talk, a picture emerges of Lennon and Ono?s gentle, sometimes childlike but effective protests and the furious responses they evoked.
But the movie doesn?t talk to Paul McCartney or Ringo Starr, and that?s a loss.
Because of McCartney?s absence, we?re reminded of the Lennon-McCartney feud, one of the bad trips of the ?
70s. It?s worth remembering that the Beatles changed the world not because of Lennon or McCartney alone but because of the whole band.
Yet all unfortunate Beatle infighting pales before the saga of Lennon?s persecution. Lennon, like almost any great pop-cultural figure, was capable of narcissism and folly.
But this movie shows him standing up to power in grave times and surviving dogged and unfair treatment.
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