WhatzUp

Across The Universe
by Derek Neff

Across the Universe

A musical that joins together three dozen or so Beatles songs into a kaleidoscopic portrait of the 1960s, Across the Universe has a bold make-it-or-break-it ambition to it that is often lacking in most mainstream American movies. It opens itself up to criticism in all kinds of ways that more cautious filmmakers might have more adeptly avoided, but in doing so those same filmmakers might very well have leached Across the Universe of all that is special about it.

And it is a special movie, replete with often brilliant reinterpretations of Beatles classics, endlessly inventive visual design, memorable choreography and a kinetic exuberance that, while never quite convincingly recreating that “turbulent decade” (federal law requires that whenever you mention the 60s you must describe it as “turbulent”), does still manage to give us a sense of the natural high of youthful romanticism, regardless of time or place.

Liverpool ship welder Jude (Jim Sturgess) goes to America to meet his biological father, but he stays to partake of the revelry with his newfound friends, including Max (Joe Anderson) and Max’s sister, Lucy (Evan Rachel Wood). Jude and Max soon move to New York City where they share a walk-up loft with several other bohemian types, and along the way they tangentially connect with the main issues of the day: protests against the Vietnam War; the civil rights movement; Nixonian strong-arming; music; acid; pot; and long hair. For younger viewers who don’t know much about the 60s, the movie functions as sort of the Reader’s Digest version of the Reader’s Digest version: all the salient parts are there, but without some outside context they won’t make much sense.

The plot is secondary to the music anyway, and that’s probably as it should be when you have the richest pop songbook in the world to work with. Director Julie Taymor never coasts on the strength of the songs alone, though. Not content just to take a classic like “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and more or less replicate it with new vocals, Taymor instead re-imagines the song as a mournful ode sung by restless Prudence (T.V. Carpio) as she pines, not for the football hero, but for the football hero’s cheerleader girlfriend. When, during the “With a Little Help From My Friends” sequence, a drunk at the bar turns to young Jude and chimes in hopefully “could it be anybody?” you laugh in appreciation for the witty spin on the long-familiar lyric.

The movie plays almost more like a mix-tape of great videos than as a cohesive film. I watched the movie straight through once, then, a day or two later, enjoyed skipping around from one memorable musical number to another. Several sequences are flat out amazing and deserve special mention. What a treat to see Joe Cocker singing “Come Together,” complete with seemingly hundreds of briefcase-wielding sidewalk pedestrians dancing around young JoJo (Martin Luther) the first time he comes to NYC. In another scene a bowling alley becomes the set-up for an irrepressibly twangy version of “I’ve Just Seen a Face.”

The movie reaches its absolute zenith, though, when Max gets inducted into the army. An Uncle Sam poster comes to life, leans over and points directly at Max singing (you guessed it) “I Want You / I want you so bad!” What Taymor and her crew do with this song has to be seen to be believed. It is so amazingly detailed, so inventively edited, so well choreographed that I wonder how the movie’s many detractors can honestly stand by their harsh dismissal of the film without feeling at least a twinge of guilt.

The movie does have its problems, though. It’s too long by at least 30 minutes, for one thing. I’m not sure how I’d cut the running time down by that much, though a good start would be to completely lop off the section in which Bono (as a Ken Kesey type) sings “I Am the Walrus.” Several other songs are ungracefully shoe-horned into the storyline – do we really need the “Dear Prudence” number, for instance? – but nothing seems more forced than this one. I love Bono as much as the next guy, but his part here just doesn’t work.

Neither do most of the scenes featuring Sadie, played by Dana Fuchs. Sadie sings several Beatles songs onstage with JoJo, her ace guitarist. (Sadie is supposed to fill in for Janis Joplin, while JoJo represents Jimi Hendrix.) It’s not a problem when Beatles songs are used in fanciful, traditional song-and-dance numbers by the other characters to advance or comment on the story. The problem with Sadie’s performance of the songs is that she sings them as if they were written by her, and not the Beatles, prompting us to ask distracting questions like, “If Sadie supposedly wrote ‘Helter Skelter,’ and not Lennon and McCartney, then did Charles Manson have delusions in which she told him to kill all those people, or what?” In other words, we realize that we’re in some parallel universe in which the Beatles never actually existed, only their songs, and then the whole notion that this movie could ever really be about the 60s completely unravels.

I could go on, but I won’t. The movie as a whole is far from perfect, but several scenes, taken by themselves, are damn close, and it’s for those – as well as for admirably rounded-out performances by Wood and Sturgess in the leading roles – that I recommend it.

That, and the music. If we needed a reminder that the Beatles are to pop music as Shakespeare is to literature – and we shouldn’t, since the music has never stopped playing a prominent role in the Western cultural landscape – this is a great one. Even uprooted from their original arrangements, transplanted into a musical, and sung by others, the songs still work beautifully – melodious, goosebump-inducing and jewel-like in their precision. The highest praise I can give Taymor is that she never forgets that the music is the real star of the show here. The rest is just window-dressing.