In the fall of 1971, John Lennon and Yoko Ono moved into an apartment on 105 Bank Street in the West Village of Manhattan. It had been two years since Lennon told his Beatles bandmates that he wanted “a divorce,” and the recently married couple craved a fresh start in America away from the oppressive shadow of the group he founded. By this point, Lennon and Ono’s lives were completely intertwined—they were not merely lovers, but also close creative collaborators whose artistry was developing in tandem. Her background in the avant-garde and gallery world intermingled with his experience with pop music and celebrity until their work became inseparable from persona. Together they garnered a more focused political conscience as the Vietnam war continued unabated amidst an increasingly fractured, hostile social environment. They wished to put theory into action, to commit to activist politics, and what better place to do that than in the cultural hub of the Western world?
Kevin Macdonald’s archival documentary “One to One: John & Yoko” chronicles the 18 months when Lennon and Ono lived in their West Village apartment. The impetus for the film, however, stems from the recently restored footage of Lennon’s “One to One” benefit concert, which sought to raise money for Willowbrook State School, a sorely underfunded, scandalous institution for special needs children whose poor conditions were initially publicized on television by Geraldo Rivera. It was the only time he played a full-length show after leaving the Beatles and it was previously released to the public in a highly compromised form.
The footage from the concert, which Macdonald intersperses throughout the film, complete with remastered sound courtesy of Sean Ono Lennon, is remarkable. Backed by the psych-rock music of the Plastic Ono Elephant’s Memory Band, Lennon sounds focused and lively as he runs through songs from his solo releases, including “Power to the People” and “Imagine,” and Macdonald especially highlights Ono’s material from the show as well, which, much like her recorded music, presage the No Wave movement by roughly a decade.
But Macdonald makes the shrewd choice not to rest his film on the innate power of the concert footage. Instead, he uses it as a springboard to capture a small slice of Lennon and Ono’s life, as well as a crucial point in American history, primarily through the lens of television — local news coverage, panel shows, game shows, sitcoms, advertisements, etc. It’s an appropriate framework considering that Lennon, upon landing in America, became obsessed with American television, especially the sheer amount of channels available to him. By all accounts, he spent an exorbitant amount of time watching TV in his bed, so Macdonald and his editor Sam Rice-Edwards (also credited as a co-director) recreate this experience by sequencing much of the film as if an off-screen Lennon is flipping through channels in 1971 and ’72.
It’s a compelling structural gambit, one that eschews talking-head interviews with Lennon’s contemporaries and, crucially, sidesteps strained attempts to say anything new about the man, an all-but-impossible task. When Macdonald commits to the TV framework, he and Rice-Edwards create a captivating visual collage that juxtaposes the relatively banal, like Frosted Flakes commercials and “The Price is Right,” against images from the Attica Prison riot or the George Wallace assassination attempt, not to mention the unceasing coverage of Vietnam. In between, we see Lennon and Ono leverage their celebrity in televised interview appearances to promote left politics and highlight the efforts of activists like Jerry Rubin and Allen Ginsberg. At its best, “One to One” accomplishes the ambitious task of conjuring a time fraught with sociopolitical tension, of which Lennon and Ono were smack dab in the middle, via a medley of televisual snippets.
“One to One,” however, digresses from this structure by incorporating archival footage from various rallies as well as previously unreleased material like home videos and phone call recordings of Lennon and Ono talking to close associates. The phone calls are especially revealing: you hear Ono vulnerably tell musician David Peel about the experience of being a victim of character assassination on the part of abusive strangers and the chauvinistic press; you hear Lennon insist his appearances at protests won’t lead to an assassination attempt. Lennon also explicitly confirms that he’s recording his calls out of self-preservation given that the FBI was tapping his phone because the Nixon administration considered him a subversive figure. (The phone calls are also a source of comic relief: we hear a series of calls were made on behalf of Ono to iron out the logistics of gathering thousands of flies for an art piece.)
Macdonald’s film doesn’t exactly require a narrative; a scattered portrait of a scattered time feels like an appropriate way to depict Lennon and Ono at that particular moment, and the archival and television footage speaks volumes on its own. A throughline eventually emerges involving Lennon and Ono committing to and then ultimately retreating from confrontational left politics. While Lennon gladly participates in events like the John Sinclair Freedom Rally and tries to organize a “Free the People” tour that would unite the nation’s youth against Nixon, he eventually finds himself disillusioned by the more combative elements in his activist circle. When Rubin suggests to Lennon that he play a rally at the 1972 RNC in Miami, Lennon declines citing his discomfort with Rubin planning to lead young people into a violent confrontation with the police.
“One to One” doesn’t explicitly editorialize on Lennon’s political conscience, but it implies that the intransigence of some prominent Yippies combined with his outsize celebrity, which made him the victim of a three-year-long deportation campaign on behalf of the Nixon White House, led him to channel his social activism into more explicitly peaceful causes. (Or maybe he just got tired of trying to convince A. J. Weberman not to rifle through Bob Dylan’s trash to prove he’s an agent of capitalism.) The One to One benefit particularly stems from Lennon and Ono’s shared sensitivity towards children, with Macdonald’s film highlighting the trauma that Ono carried from when her daughter, Kyoko, was taken from her by her ex-husband amidst a nasty custody battle. Lennon and Ono’s search for Kyoko was a major reason why they moved to the States and Ono would only reunite with her in 1998, almost 20 years after Lennon’s murder.
Ironically, it’s Macdonald’s attempt to string together various narratives from the footage that make the film feel more cluttered than it otherwise would. Only a meticulous sense of design could generate something like “One to One,” but the film most succeeds when its editorial construction simulates the disorder of its depicted historical moment, both the events themselves and their transmission through the media. Macdonald clearly understands the feeling of information overload, the way that entertainment clashes with news and global violence competes with the latest trivial moment, and whenever “One to One” embraces that idea, it becomes a fruitful view into Lennon and Ono’s place within the culture.
Alas, the film eventually evinces a desperate attempt at cohesion, whether that’s by grafting a reductive linearity onto political history or repeatedly circling back to Lennon and Ono’s relationship, as if the audience would forget that that’s why the film exists in the first place. If there’s anyone who was humbled by and skeptical of celebrity, it was Lennon and Ono, who sought to convey to the world that they were not at the center of it despite their name recognition. It’s why there’s a power to “One to One” situating them as simply a part of the cultural morass, especially because it’s in productive tension with the need to constantly spotlight them.
But the film’s numerous, respectable agendas muffle that potency. It’s understandable that “One to One,” for example, strives to correct the sexist, xenophobic record with regards to Ono’s image as a weird homewrecker, or underscores Lennon’s enlightenment with regards to feminism in contrast with the misogyny of his musician peers, but it ultimately detracts from a strong editorial design that appropriately stresses their relationship to a larger, more complex world over themselves.
“One to One” incorporates a thorough, precise recreation of Lennon and Ono’s Bank Street apartment, courtesy of Oscar-nominated production designer Tatiana Macdonald, Kevin’s wife. The brief glimpses we see of their apartment communicate a comfortable domesticity that embodies the all-encompassing love Lennon and Ono felt for each other. As much as the film repeatedly pays tribute to their relationship— its unaffected honesty, their political influence, the beautiful and often alienating art they created — it can’t compete with the view of their cozy apartment. “All I want is the truth,” Lennon once sang; he knew that it’s much simpler than you could ever imagine.
Grade: B+
“One to One: John and Yoko” premiered at the Venice Film Festival.It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.
