There's a certain something that happens to you when you're covering Oscar season and playing lots of The Beatles: Rock Band at the same time: You start to notice how almost every one of the top contenders for Best Picture this year has a Beatles song that describes it perfectly. Is that a tribute to the Beatles' discography, or does this year's crop of movies just possess an uncanny thematic link to their songbook? Let Movieline present our findings to you, and then you can be the judge.
Over the next few pages, you'll find our analysis. Let us know what you think!
An Education
"She's Leaving Home"
The Beatles ballad could be an anthem for An Education's Jenny (Carey Mulligan), a teenager in 1960's England who bristles under the thumb of her parents, and hopes to escape the dour future they've planned out for her by joining up with an older man to have...well, fun.
Sample Lyrics:
She (We never thought of ourselves)
Is leaving (Never a thought for ourselves)
Home (We struggled hard all our lives to get by)
She's leaving home after living alone
For so many years
Friday morning at nine o'clock she is far away
Waiting to keep the appointment she made
Meeting a man from the motor trade
She (What did we do that was wrong)
Is having (We didn't know it was wrong)
Fun (Fun is the one thing that money can't buy)
Something inside that was always denied
For so many years
Up in the Air
"Nowhere Man"
Nowhere Man has the world at his command, but doesn't know what he's missing. Sort of like Up in the Air's frequent traveler Ryan (George Clooney), who slowly realizes that his refusal to put down roots has cost him untold emotional rewards.
Sample Lyrics:
He's a real nowhere man
Sitting in his nowhere land
Making all his nowhere plans for nobody
Doesn't have a point of view
Knows not where he's going to
Isn't he a bit like you and me?
Up
"When I'm Sixty-Four"
Like the protagonist of this Beatles song, Up's Carl Fredricksen had hoped to "scrimp and save" so that when he got older, he and his wife would have a vacation home with plenty of grandchildren running around. Sadly, life had other plans.
Sample Lyrics:
When I get older losing my hair
Many years from now
Will you still be sending me a valentine
Birthday greetings, bottle of wine?
If I'd been out till quarter to three
Would you lock the door?
Will you still need me, will you still feed me
When I'm sixty-four?
You'll be older too
And if you say the word
I could stay with you
Precious
"Eleanor Rigby"
Clareece 'Precious' Jones is a solitary figure, alone and unloved, with dreams her only respite from a lonely life. Something tells me she'd have a lot to talk about with the similarly invisible Eleanor Rigby.
Sample Lyrics:
Ah, look at all the lonely people
Ah, look at all the lonely people
Eleanor Rigby picks up the rice in the church where a wedding has been
Lives in a dream
Waits at the window, wearing the face that she keeps in a jar by the door
Who is it for?
All the lonely people
Where do they all come from?
All the lonely people
Where do they all belong?
Nine
"Revolution 9"
Sorry. It had to be done.
Sample Lyrics:
Number 9, number 9, number 9, number 9, number 9, number 9, number 9
Bright Star
"Something"
There's something ineffable and unlikely in the love between poet John Keats (Ben Whishaw) and the fashionable Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish). What bonds them together is something he tries to express through his poetry, and something their friends and family will never understand, even when the two lovers are forcibly parted.
Sample Lyrics:
Somewhere in her smile she knows
That I don't need no other lover
Something in her style that shows me
Don't want to leave her now
You know I believe her now
The Hurt Locker
"Happiness is a Warm Gun"
The Hurt Locker's Sgt. William James (Jeremy Renner) is so addicted to adrenaline that he can't function outside a wartime setting. In a supermarket with his girlfriend, he's aimless and lost, but arm him and send him into a tense situation in Iraq, and he feels invulnerable.
Sample Lyrics:
Happiness is a warm gun (Bang bang, shoot shoot)
Happiness is a warm gun (Bang bang, shoot shoot)
When I hold you in my arms
And I feel my finger on your trigger
I know no one can do me no harm
Because happiness is a warm gun.
Yes it is.
A Single Man
"Yesterday"
The emotionally bereft George (Colin Firth) can't move on from memories of his suddenly dead lover, Jim (Matthew Goode). Nearly everything prompts a flashback of how good life used to be for the two of them, and now that he's forced to continue without Jim, George is a hollow shell of his former self.
Sample Lyrics:
Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away
Now it looks as though they're here to stay
Oh, I believe in yesterday
Suddenly, I'm not half the man I used to be
There's a shadow hanging over me.
Oh, yesterday came suddenly
The Lovely Bones
"Run for Your Life"
Here's a fun fact about the Beatles: They really liked to write songs about girl-stalking killers! Perhaps the murderer central to The Lovely Bones (played by Stanley Tucci) would prefer "Maxwell's Silver Hammer" or the Manson-inspiring "Helter Skelter," but I think the creeptastic "Run for Your Life" is a better fit.
Sample Lyrics:
You better run for your life if you can, little girl
Hide your head in the sand little girl [...]
Let this be a sermon
I mean everything I've said
Baby, I'm determined
And I'd rather see you dead