Reviewed by Meera Atkinson
John Lennon is a man so famous, so iconic, so talked about and revered that it was hard to imagine, hearing the news of a new documentary about him, that there was anything left to say. Surely, even die-hard Beatles/Lennon fans would wonder if they’d seen and heard it all before.
Directors: David Leaf, John Scheinfeld
Documentary DVD
Sure enough, much of the material in The US Vs John Lennon, a look at the US government’s fear of Lennon’s influence and its attempts to contain him, is familiar. The political passion and social justice bent of a man who was often criticised and largely ridiculed for both his love of Yoko and his outspokenness on matters of public import, are already legendary.
What this documentary does offer that’s fresh is a redeeming focus on this aspect of his career, and he is redeemed not because time has proven him victor in his campaign for peace (it hasn’t), but because he is revealed here as a man of deep conviction and heart. He was not, like certain others, simply caught up in the posturings and polemics of the day.
Lennon’s political concerns were not simply the idealistic rantings of a powerful man in his prime at s tumultuous, violent, and revolutionary point in history, though he was most certainly an idealist. They were, above all, justified even if his methods of expressing them — such as his and Yoko’s infamous “bed in” honeymoon — often appeared to others as naive (upper class New York Times writer, Gloria Emerson, is shown patronising him in a debate).
Yoko is also redeemed. I never trust a person that doesn’t like Yoko. Though widely reviled as Lennon’s wife and soul mate she was and is an artist of great originality and importance in her own right and this documentary shows the tender underbelly of their relationship as well as its strident political force and mutual commitment.
The film makes a connection between the abandoned boy that Lennon was, the troubled and wildly talented young man he became, and the political passion that raged as he matured. It makes clear that it was a passion informed by his own suffering, his own lived and personal understanding of injustice, illustrating the old adage that the “personal is political”.
The US Vs John Lennon is a pacey watch with its cast of many including interviews with the likes of Noam Chomsky and Gore Vidal (who boldly claims: “Lennon represented life. Nixon and Bush represent death”) and the requisite solo Lennon soundtrack.
One of the most interesting revelations in this documentary is the moving relationship between John and Yoko and the lawyer who defended them in their fight against the U.S. government. In one funny and fascinating scene John and Yoko sit beside him at a press conference and, in a performance art/protest spectacle, a genre they mastered, declare with poker faces the formation of a new, conceptual nation, Nutopia. The look on his face is priceless as they explain to the gathered earnest journalists that citizenship to Nutopia could be obtained merely by a declaration of awareness of its existence, that is has no land, boundaries, or passports, and no laws other than cosmic.
There was a darker side to the saga of course — phone tappings, cancelled appearances, and paranoia — but in the end John and Yoko won. The irony was though that their staying in the country eventually led to his premature death, which was, after all, a singularly American tragedy.
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