Top, Himesh Patel as a musician in a world that has forgotten the Beatles. Why?
We have no idea. Center, Bill Murray as the disgruntled weatherman Phil
Connors, opposite Andie MacDowell, in “Groundhog Day.” Above, from left, Louis
C.K., Ricky Gervais and Jennifer Garner in “The Invention of Lying.”COLUMBIA PICTURESSAM URDANK/WARNER BROS.Most stories explore the basics: who, what,
where, when and especiallywhy. But some
movies skip that last one.
The new Danny Boyle film, “Yesterday,”
imagines a world without one of the most
influential musical acts of all time, the Beat-
les. During a global blackout, Jack Malik
(Himesh Patel), a middling songwriter, has
a bike accident and is knocked unconscious.
When he wakes up, he remembers the band,
but no one else does.
But we never find out why a blackout
causes the world to forget about the Beatles
or why Jack remembers them.
It didn’t matter for the film’s primary
screenwriter, Richard Curtis. Where many
films go out of their way to justify elaborate
or quirky premises, Curtis opted to focus
only on the existential questions the story
posed: How would the Beatles fare if they
debuted in 2019? Are performances as im-
portant as compositions? And what about
the ethics of claiming ownership of music
that isn’t yours? Is it stealing if the band
didn’t exist to begin with?
“You try and make it as logical as you
can,” Curtis said in a phone interview. “But I
think the problem is, if you really try and
prove the point that something that can’t
happen happened, you will tie yourself up in
knots.”
This story got me thinking about other
films whose plots are based on unique
premises with minimal explanation. Since a
lot of movie plots seem inexplicable, I came
up with some arbitrary rules. Someone’s be-
havior cannot set the story in motion. (For
instance, in the 2000 comedy “Family Man,”
it’s implied that Don Cheadle’s character,
Cash, causes the holiday ills that befall
Nicolas Cage’s Jack Campbell.) The prem-
ise has to be almost entirely unexplained.
So not “Big” (1988), because the story gets
going with a wish, or “The Matrix” (1999),
in which the origin story is explained by the
characters. Superhero movies don’t count
either.
I took a closer look at four such films,
though honorable mentions should be given
to “What Women Want” (2000), “Stranger
Than Fiction” (2006) and “Being John Mal-
kovich” (1999).
‘Groundhog Day’ (1993)
Directed by Harold Ramis, the movie imag-
ines the disgruntled weatherman Phil Con-
nors (Bill Murray in his finest perform-
ance) living the same day over and over
again in Punxsutawney, Pa.
We never learn why Connors keeps hav-
ing to live the same day. It just happens, al-
though there is some suggestion that the
pattern is linked to Phil’s misanthropy. He
eventually evolves from a bitter narcissist
to a charitable, loving human being, all by
going through the same motions everyday.
Danny Rubin came up with the original
premise and wrote it on spec. Columbia Pic-
tures, the studio behind the film, wanted to
insert a reason Phil has to endure the pun-
ishment of not being able to get to tomor-
row. Among the justifications Rubin and
Ramis considered: a curse set by a woman
whom Connors has wronged.
“It felt so arbitrary. And I thought, ‘Why
do I have to do that at all?’ It’s just a waste of
time,” Rubin said in an interview. “And I
also realized the thing that excited me the
most about the premise was that Phil was
stuck having to deal with the day; he didn’t
know how he got there. But he still has to
deal with it.”
Rubin wrote scenes with the curse, but
Ramis didn’t end up filming them. Some-
times, it’s best to disregard the studio’s
notes.
‘Freaky Friday’ (1976)
Ignore the 2003 version starring Lindsay
Lohan and Jamie Lee Curtis. The one we
are concerned with is the 1976 original with
Barbara Harris and Jodie Foster. The film’s
story is based on a children’s novel by Mary
Rodgers, who also wrote the screenplay.
In the movie, a mother and a teenage
daughter find themselves swapping bodies
for unclear reasons after an argument. It
may seem that I’m breaking my own rule
about behavior: Yes, both make a wish at
the exact same time before the switch. But
it’s not in the presence of anyone in particu-
lar. Certainly not a robotic fortune teller, as
in “Big,” so I feel this is fine.
The 2003 version may be best known now
because it further established Lohan as a
budding star. But in that film, written by
Heather Hach and Leslie Dixon, the swap is
actually explained: It was a result of the
consumption of fortune cookies.‘The Invention of Lying’ (2009)
This film received mixed reviews when it
came out — many critics found it grating.
But I’ll get on this hill and defend an ingen-
ious premise from Ricky Gervais and
Matthew Robinson, who wrote and directed
the movie, which also starred Gervais.
The comic plays Mark Bellison, a screen-
writer in a world where no one can tell a lie.
Not white lies. Not big lies. Until Mark,
somehow, manages to do it. Of course, he
uses this to his advantage: winning money
at a casino by saying he’s won when he
hasn’t; withdrawing money he doesn’t have
from bank accounts; keeping a police offi-
cer from arresting his friend for drunken
driving.
However, the audience never learns why
Mark develops the ability to lie. There is a
fleeting look inside his brain, where he
seemingly has been given the tool to do it,
but really, not much else.
In actuality, there was a scene to explainthe discrepancy. Robinson said in an email
that they had shot an elaborate opening that
took place in prehistoric times, in which a
cave man (also played by Gervais) tells his
tribe he killed a boar to impress them, when
the boar had actually been killed by a falling
boulder. It was the most expensive scene to
shoot of the entire film, but it ended up on
the cutting-room floor. Robinson and Ger-
vais found it unnecessary.
“Ricky and I always felt we wanted to do
the bare minimum necessary to explain the
premise of the film, so we’d have as much
time as possible for comedy and character,”
Robinson said.‘Colossal’ (2017)
An explanation of the plot cannot do any
justice to the premise of this movie. Written
and directed by Nacho Vigalondo, it centers
on a down-on-her-luck, unpredictable wom-
an named Gloria (played by Anne Hath-
away), who goes back to her hometown,
where she strikes up a relationship with Os-
car, a bartender she grew up with (Jason
Sudeikis).
The two find that simply by being at a
playground at a certain time, they have the
ability to control a monster and robot that
are terrorizing Seoul on the other side of the
world. Eventually, Oscar turns villainous,
and by proxy, so does the robot, causing a
showdown with Gloria’s monster and
putting the fate of millions of civilians at
stake.
There is next to zero explanation as to
how this was possible. You’re just supposed
to enjoy the ride. (And I did.)
“The reason my characters have giant
monster avatars is explained only emotion-
ally,” Vigalondo said in an email. “A rational
or scientific origin story would have worked
if my movie was centered around the mys-
tery of the monster’s appearance. In this
case, the characters never try to solve the
mystery. They are just affected by the
consequences.”That Odd Plot Twist? Just Roll With It
A tribute to quirky films
like ‘Groundhog Day’ and
‘Yesterday,’ whose premises
nobody bothers to explain.
By SOPAN DEBJONATHAN PRIME/UNIVERSAL PICTURESC6 N THE NEW YORK TIMES, TUESDAY, JULY 30, 2019
THE BEST PIECE OF ADVICEI’ve ever heard
about being a journalist is from the inves-
tigative reporter Amy Goodman, who has
worked in Nigeria and East Timor, among
other places. Goodman said this: “Go to
where the silence is and say something.”
That sentence hung in my mind while
reading “Our Women on the Ground: Es-
says by Arab Women Reporting From the
Arab World,” a stirring, provocative and
well-made new anthology edited by the
Lebanese-British journalist Zahra Hankir.
It’s a book that banishes all manner of si-
lences.
Hankir invited 19 Arab and Middle East-
ern sahafiyat— female journalists — to de-
tail their experiences reporting from some
of the most repressive countries in the
world. The result is a volume that rewrites
the hoary rules of the foreign correspon-
dent playbook, deactivating the old clichés.
Each of these women has a story to tell.
Each has seen plenty.
Some of these journalists work (or have
worked) for establishment media outlets
like the BBC, NPR, The Financial Times,
Bloomberg, Al Jazeera, The Washington
Post and The New York Times. Others are
freelance photographers, or small website
operators.
They hail from, among other places,
Egypt, Syria, Morocco, Yemen, Iraq, Leba-
non, Sudan and Libya, though many also
have a foot in the Western world. There’s alot of self-scrutiny in this volume. A sub-
theme is the guilt many of these reporters
feel over their own relative privilege, the
fact that their own families are safe while
the people they write about tend to live in
poverty and in terror.
“Our Women on the Ground” has many
aspects to it — it’s about ambition, har-
assment and misogyny, sex, family, bravery,
politics, religion, history, broken lives and
double lives — but at bottom it imparts a
pervasive sense of fear and loss. There are
two harrowing deaths before we are 30
pages in.
The first is that of a young Syrian woman,
a philosophy graduate named Ruqia Hasan,
who was abducted and killed by ISIS for her
outspoken posts on social media. She knew
what was coming. She wrote on Facebook,
“While they will cut off my head, I’ll still
have dignity, which is better than living in
humiliation.” Her story is delivered by Han-
kir, in her introduction.
The second is that of The New York
Times’s Beirut bureau chief Anthony Sha-
did, who died at 43 in 2012, apparently of an
asthma attack, while reporting in Syria. The
author of this powerful and rueful essay is
his widow, Nada Bakri, who has also re-
ported for The Times.
Bakri, like nearly all the writers in this
book, does not hold back. After Shadid’s
death, she writes: “I quit journalism, left
my home in Beirut and moved thousands of
miles away from everyone I knew and ev-
erything familiar. Along the way, I became
someone I don’t recognize.”
Many of these essays are about trying to
work in dangerous circumstances, doubly
so for women. As Zaina Erhaim writes in
her essay, “I am a Syrian; a woman who
lived in the most masculine of spaces; a
journalist in a land of warlords; a secularistliving among different kinds of extremists.”
She adds, “I would be a greattarget, some-
one a fighter would be proud to have killed.”
There are accounts here of reporting
from war zones and, for example, of being
embedded with the United States military
during the Iraq war. When these journalists
were unable to be on the scene, they be-
came skilled at scanning social media, espe-
cially YouTube videos, and gleaning infor-
mation from those sources. Another kind of
silence this book charts is the one that ar-
rives when a source goes dark, because
they’ve keen killed or forced out of their
homes.
There are places these journalists can go
that men cannot: kitchens and hair salons,
to name two. In her essay, Hannah Allam,
an NPR national security reporter whoworked for McClatchy newspapers during
the Iraq war, suggests that reporters ignore
so-called women’s stories at their peril.
Noting that on an average day at the
height of the Iraq war, it was common for 80
men to die from car bombs, Allam writes:
“Consider those numbers for a moment: 80
dead men meant 80 new widows and dozens
of newly fatherless children. Every day.”
These women needed to become providers.
There is a good deal of gallows humor in
“Our Women on the Ground.” There are
high spirits; several romances are re-
counted. There are many, many stories of
frightening and unwanted attention from
men. Yet in her essay, Donna Abu-Nasr,
Bloomberg’s Saudi Arabia bureau chief,
catches some of the absurdity that can be in
the air, too.
“Often, while I was stuck in traffic, young
men would slam Post-its or papers with
their mobile phone numbers scribbled on
them on the window of my car,” she writes.
“That was one way to pick up women. An-
other was to go to the mall and throw the
little slips of paper at the feet of women cov-
ered head to toe in black.”
The optimism that attended the Arab
Spring in the early 2010s slowly evaporates
in these essays. Things grow worse, not bet-
ter. About the Syrian crisis that began in
2011, Hwaida Saad, a reporter for The New
York Times, notes: “Ideas changed, and so
did faces — many of which grew beards. On
the radio, jihadi songs replaced those of
Elissa. Innocence gradually disappeared.”
The Palestinian writer and free-press ad-
vocate Asmaa al-Ghoul recalls some of the
romance that attended the early days of the
Arab Spring protests. “We thought that we
were going to change the world,” she writes.
“How I pity the generation that will have to
go out to do it all over again.”DWIGHT GARNER BOOKS OF THE TIMES
Rewriting the Rules of Reporting in the Arab World
Female journalists recount their
experiences in an anthology
edited by Zahra Hankir.
Our Women on the Ground: MARIA WILSON
Essays by Arab Women
Reporting From the Arab
World
Edited by Zahra Hankir
Illustrated. 278 pages. Penguin
Books. Paper, $17.
Zahra HankirFollow Dwight Garner on Twitter:
@DwightGarner.