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Lennon Naked follows John Lennon (fully clothed, for the most part) from the height of The Beatles’ fame in 1964 to his move from England to New York in 1971, where he would live until his death in 1980. Part of BBC4’s Fatherhood series, the programme focuses on Lennon’s relationship with both his own father and his son Julian, with sometimes devastating honesty. Well, I say “devastating”. It actually wasn’t really very devastating at all. The scenes of his brutal treatment of his first wife and son were clearly meant to be stirring and poignant, but I found that I just didn’t care.
I had such high hopes for Lennon Naked. I’m not really a fan of The Beatles, but I am a fan of Christopher Eccleston, and I’ve enjoyed many of the BBC4 biographies that I’ve seen before, especially last year's Enid. The depiction of Enid Blyton wasn't in the least bit flattering – she was portrayed as a cruel mother and a mean, bitter wife, but something about the production just worked. The shock of seeing a woman famous for her children’s stories being so mean to her own children, coupled with an astonishing performance from Helena Bonham-Carter, made the whole thing completely compelling, even if it wasn’t easy to watch.
The main problem with Lennon Naked was that I just didn’t believe that Christopher Eccleston was John Lennon. For a start, his accent was inconsistent at best, while he was a couple of decades too old to be believable as the boyish Lennon in 1964. In many ways this reminded me of the recent Ian Dury biopic, Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll: the difficult relationship with his father, the nastiness towards his first wife. But that film worked because of Andy Serkis’s truly astonishing central performance, and while I love Eccleston, he doesn’t have the type of screen magnetism that made Serkis compelling to watch even when Dury was being despicable. The decision to use real footage of Lennon mixed in with the drama was brave, but it ultimately didn’t pay off, as it just kept reminding me that Eccleston wasn’t actually Lennon.
The minor characters are generally well acted (particularly Claudie Blakely as Lennon’s first wife) but most of them continue to feel like underwritten minor characters rather than fully fleshed out human beings. The two women in Lennon’s life, Cynthia and Yoko Ono, never feel compelling. The Beatles are only in a handful of scenes, and Paul is the only one given any real chance to speak. This just compounds the problem of Eccleston never gelling as Lennon – it felt like I was watching a drama about some random man who was mean to his wife and child rather than the true story behind a legend.
There was some good stuff here – Lennon is given a sharp, cruel sense of humour, while his relationship with his father does have some interesting moments. But it wasn’t enough to override the fact that, well, I just didn’t care.
I thought it was fantastic. I can't help but think that if you don't really like or appreciate Lennon or the Beatles, then you're judging this an an Eccleston drama, not a Lennon drama, which isn't fair.
Also, I don't think his accent was inconsisent, especially seeing as he grew up in Salford, only 30 miles from Lennon's native Liverpool.
I'm no expert on accents, but even I noticed it wasn't great at times. The fact that he's from Manchester doesn't prevent him from doing a slightly dodgy Liverpool accent.
But surely it isn't unreasonable to expect it work as both an Eccleston drama and a Lennon drama? I'm not a massive fan of Johnny Cash, but Walk the Line is one of my favourite films ever, while I knew hardly anything about Ian Dury but I thoroughly enjoyed Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll. And anyway, my main problem was that it didn't feel like a drama about John Lennon. It just felt like a drama about some not very nice person who happened to have the same name as a famous guy. I just didn't believe Eccleston as Lennon. I'd be really interested to hear the views of someone who's a big fan of Lennon, though - I'm just saying that my review isn't immediately invalid because I'm looking at it from another point of view.
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