And from the interview clips Soderbergh uses here, we can see she wasn’t wrong. Lennon had always had the quickest and most acidic wit of all the Beatles. By this point, at age 40, and having recently weathered some marital difficulties with Ono—famously, she’d gotten fed up and kicked him out—he’s mellower, sweeter, wittier in a gentler way. Throughout the interview, the couple speak, separately and together, about their belief that men and women have become disconnected from one another and need better ways to communicate. Lennon admits, with his newfound wisdom, that men simply need to get better at listening. He expounds on the joys of being a househusband in charge of the daily care of his young son, Sean (at least until, sometime after breakfast, the nanny takes over for the rest of the day). He speaks of the deep pleasures of returning to music after a five-year break, to emerge with a collaborative album designed to affirm the joys of marital love. There’s little that’s wrong with the interview itself, and some of Lennon’s pronouncements are more illuminating than he may even realize. There’s no doubt about his love for Ono and Sean. Every once in a while, he mentions his “other” family, referring to his first wife, Cynthia, and older son Julian, as if they were a faraway footnote—because for him, they clearly are.
