First, Taymor selected 33 songs from Sony's 200-title Beatles songbook (rights use was reportedly $10 million). She chose songs from the Beatles' early pop years and well as the more socially conscious songs John Lennon was pushing for around the time of the Beatles' break up. She then worked with screenwriters Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais to fashion a story that would weave these songs together into some kind of narrative. She couldn't use any of the Beatles' original recordings, so all the songs are newly arranged and sung by the mostly young cast (a few singing cameos by vets such as Joe Cocker and Bono are sprinkled in).
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Across the Universe (Sony Pictures)
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So the story they've crafted begins in the early 60s and involves Jude (Jim Sturgess), a Liverpool shipyard worker who heads off to the United States to find his estranged American father. But once Jude arrives in the United States, he's taken under the wing of Ivy Leaguer Max (Joe Anderson), a rebellious rich kid who quits school and moves into a communal apartment with Jude and a sultry, Janis Joplin-like singer named Sadie (Dana Fuchs). Jude takes an immediate liking to Max's cute sis Lucy (Evan Rachel Wood). When Max gets drafted, Lucy becomes radicalized and joins the protest movement, which causes a rift in her relationship with Jude. This allows Taymor to head off on a psychedelic journey chronicling love, activism, music and groovy, drug-induced flights of fancy.
Across the Universe serves up a handful of brilliant music videos badly strung together by a lame narrative that borrows heavily from Hair . I think I would have enjoyed the film more if Taymor had just thrown out the pretense of a plot. I could have bought into a string of disconnected music videos more than into this contrived story that constantly seems to be struggling with how to work each song or Beatles reference in. Taymor and company come up with some good covers of Beatles' songs, in which they don't try to merely redo them in the style of the Beatles, but rather they try to reinvent them. Sturgess' Jude has a lovely moment when he half-speaks, half-sings the lines of "All My Loving" to the girl he's leaving behind. Then when he becomes infatuated with Lucy, there's a fun, Big Lebowski-inpsired take on "I've Just Seen a Face" set in colorful bowling alley. In a subplot, actress T.V. Carpio delivers a fresh lesbian take on "I Want to Hold Your Hand." She's a high school cheerleader longing for another girl on the squad, and Taymor has her dreamily walking across the football field as sweaty young men throw themselves across the screen without her ever displaying the slightest interest. There's also brilliantly inspired anti-war, anti-government take on "I Want You," in which Uncle Sam steps out of a poster to recruit Max. The number (which is a kindred spirit to Hair's "Black Boys/White Boys") serves up an assembly line through which young conscripts are rudely processed and then spit out into the jungles of VietNam where they carry the Statue of Liberty to the refrain of "She's So Heavy." There's also a dance of mass conformity on the streets of New York to "Come Together" that works incredibly well. All these sequences are stunning and reveal an audacious talent at work.
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Strawberry fields forever...Across the Universe (Sony Pictures)
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Unfortunately these moments make up only a fraction of the film's two-hour plus running time. And for each good number, there are far more that don't work, such as "With a Little Help From My Friends" done as a kind of awkward frat boy party or a pretentious rendition of "Let It Be" set against riots in the street. The cameo appearances by Bono ("I am the Walrus") and Eddie Izzard ("For the Benefit of Mr. Kite") also fall flat despite the massive production values heaped on their numbers. At these points, Across the Universe comes dangerously close to being like the horrendous Robert Stigwood produced 70s Sgt. Pepper's movie that featured Peter Frampton and the Bee Gees.
The film also suffers from the added distraction of waiting to see how each Beatles' song will work its way into the film. People such as Jude and Prudence dutifully have the songs with their names wedged into the story, but then Max/Maxwell just ends up with an awkward scene of him pounding away with a silver hammer, but we never hear the song bearing his name. Other songs are just mentioned by title but not sung, as when Carpio's character comes in through the bathroom window and Jude uses the Beatles' song ("She Came in through the Bathroom Window") to describe what happen. There's also an old timer who makes reference to when he's 64. These references are designed to be clever inside jokes for Beatles' fans but they tend to fall flat. As does the joke about Jude creating the record label logo, which, instead of being Apple records, is a strawberry for a label called Strawberry Jam.
Across the Universe (rated P-13 for some drug content, nudity, sexuality, violence and language) will probably please Taymor's fans. She's a bold, iconoclastic visualist and her stage background shows in many of the scenes. But unlike her feature film debut Titus, Across the Universe is theatrical without always being cinematic. The result is a frequently self-conscious artiness. Taymor also weakens her harsh political message with a soft and sweet "All We Need Is Love" ending. For someone who seems so tough and iconoclastic in thought and imagery, this just seems like a pat Hollywood ending.
Listen to our Film Club discussion of Across the Universe.
Compnaion viewing: Titus , Moulin Rouge, Hair
