Across the Universe
This is a bold, beautiful musical. Julie Taymor’s “Across the Universe” is an audacious combination of state of the art visual technology and heart warming performances set against the backdrop of 1960s history and using the Beatles songbook. Sounds behind its time as a concept, but I believe in yesterday.
It’s not one of those druggy 1960s movies, though it does have what the MPAA shyly refers to as “some” drug content. It’s not grungy, though Joe Cocker’s in it. It’s not political which means it’s political to its core. Most miraculous of all, it’s not dated; the stories could be happening now; in fact they are.
For a movie that’s almost wall to wall music, it has a full-bodied plot. The characters, mostly named after Beatles songs, include Lucy (the angelic Evan Rachel Wood), who moves from middle America to New York; Jude (Jim Sturgess), a Liverpool ship welder who works his way to New York on a ship; and Lucy’s brother Max (Joe Anderson), a college student who has dropped out (I guess).
They now all share a pad in Greenwich Village with their musician friends: the Hendrixian Jo-Jo (Martin Luther McCoy), Joplinesque Sadie (Dana Fuchs) and lovelorn Prudence (T.V. Carpio), who loves women but doesn’t feel free to express her true feelings.
Jude and Lucy fall in love, and they go through a hippie period on Dr. Robert’s Magic Bus , where Dr. Robert (Bono) and his bus bear more than a passing resemblance to Ken Kesey’s Merry Prankster bus Further . They also get guidance from Mr. Kite (Eddie Izzard), having been some days in preparation . But then things turn serious when Max goes off to Vietnam and the story gets swept up in the anti-war movement .
But don’t start thinking this means there’s a lot of dialogue and plotting. Almost everything happens as an illustration of a Beatles song . The arrangements are sometimes familiar, sometimes radically altered; the voices are all new; the actors either sing or sync, and often they find a mood in a song that we never knew was there before.
When Prudence sings “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” for example, I realized how wrong I was to ever think that was a happy song. It’s not happy if it’s a hand you’re never, never, never going to hold. The love that dare not express its name turns in sadness to song.
Julie Taymor, famous as the director of “The Lion King” on Broadway , is an inventively generous choreographer, as in a basic training scene where all the drill sergeants look like G.I. Joe; a sequence where inductees in Jockey shorts carry the Statue of Liberty through a Vietnam field; and especially cross cutting between dancing to Beatles clone bands at an American high school prom and in a Liverpool dive bar.
There are underwater sequences which approach ballet, yes there are strawberries that bleed but there are also rooftop concerts, and then there’s even musical warfare, with crashing waves cut together with scenes from the Detroit riots .
But what I am doing here is making a list. The beauty is in the execution. The movie experience is joyful. I don’t even want to hear about anyone who complains that they’re not hearing “the real Beatles.” Fred Astaire wasn’t Cole Porter, either. Some of these songs are over 40 years old now, and timeless, and the only thing more exhilarating than hearing them sung by these unexpected voices (yes, and Bono, Izzard and Cocker) is how astonishingly good they still sound.
You weren’t alive in the ’60s? Or the ’70s or ’80s? You’re the guy on the IMDb message board who thought it was “Beetles,” and didn’t get it when people made Volkswagen jokes because you hadn’t heard of VW Beetles either. We forgive you. Jay Leno has a Jaywalking spot for you. Just about anybody else should enjoy this movie.
I’m sure there were executives who thought it was suicidal to set a “Beatles musical” in the “Vietnam era.” But this is a movie that fires its songs like flowers at the way we live now; it’s the kind of movie you watch again, like listening to a favorite album. It was scheduled for Toronto but previewed (like several Toronto films) for critics in major cities; I was drowning in movies and deadlines, and this was the only one I went back to see again.
Now go rent the DVD of A Hard Day’s Night if you haven’t seen it; that there are readers who will have gotten all the way through this review of this film and never seen that film makes me unbearably sad. Cheer me up: Don’t let me down (repeat three times).
Watch Across the Universe For Free On Solarmovies.