This ‘Imagine’ Cover Is No Heaven

Critic’s Notebook The actress Gal Gadot assembled celebrities singing John Lennon’s anthem on social media. The result is far from inspiring in a time of crisis. You might say that every crisis gets the multi-celebrity car-crash pop anthem it deserves, but truly no crisis — certainly not one as vast and unsettling as the current one — deserves this. The actress Gal Gadot, on her sixth day of precautionary coronavirus self-isolation, orchestrated a line-for-line baton pass of John Lennon’s “Imagine,” a song that, over five decades, has been sturdy enough to hold up to Pentatonix, Corey Feldman, the cast of “Glee” and Blake Lewis on “American Idol.

” (He didn’t beatbox, thankfully. ) In this clusterclump of hyperfamous people with five seconds’ too much time on their hands, however, “Imagine” may have met its match. By the end, it has been pummeled and stabbed, disaggregated, stripped for parts and left for trash collection by the side of the highway. It is proof that even if no one meets up in person, horribleness can spread.

The performance is two minutes long, but watching from front to back requires about 20, with breaks for snarfing, ear-canal cleansing and bursts of who-the-hell-is-this? It begins after a brief, platitudinous monologue from Gadot, who may be on lockdown, but whose mind has been freed, bro. When she sings the opening line — “Imagine there’s no heaven” — she grins at the camera as if she’s about to pick your pocket. Or like a joyfully sadistic nurse about to administer a gruesome shot.

It feels oily. Distressing. Up next, Kristen Wiig, out in nature wearing a wide-brimmed hat, looks dour, as if her ramble had been interrupted. This misadventure turns to true chaos, though, when Jamie Dornan arrives, his hair wet-like and his voice a hollow rasp.

“No hell below us,” he … I guess, sings? More like woofs. Expectorates. Dornan is not on Instagram, so perhaps he is unaware he looks like he’s reluctantly filming a hostage video, and can’t decide if he even wants to be rescued.

A little later comes a one-two punch of disinclination: Natalie Portman, head tilting side to side like a metronome, biting on words like they taste terrible, like she wants them whooshed off her tongue; followed by Zoë Kravitz, sitting fireside in glasses, whispering drawn-out syllables first by speaking, then singing, like a turntable confused about its speed setting. Of all the participants here, only the actor Chris O’Dowd — singing alongside his wife, Dawn O’Porter — appears to understand the horror on the horizon: His worry lines are deep, his eyebrows seem to want to jump off his face and the left side of his mouth curls up toward the end of his line (“I wonder if you can”) as if pleading for forgiveness. The brutality is relentless.