Across The Universe

Actor/Actress	Character
Jim Sturgess	Jude
Evan Rachel Wood	Lucy
Bono	Dr. Robert
Eddie Izzard	Mr. Kite
Joe Anderson	Maxwell
Dan Fuchs	Sadie
Martin Luther McCoy	Jo-Jo
Directed by	Julie Taymor
Rated PG-13
131 minutes

Once upon a time, long ago and far away in a land called the Sixties, there was flower power, and bell bottoms and tie-dye, and love-ins, and sex and drugs and rock ‘n roll. And there was an unpopular war being fought in a land even farther away, and there was a draft lottery, and there were young people marching in the streets, and tuning in, turning on, and dropping out. And there was a band called the Beatles.

This will all come back to you (or be introduced as something new) if you undertake to immerse yourself in the long and winding road that is Julie Taymor’s opulent, eye-filling, and disappointingly uninvolving musical extravaganza, Across the Universe. Taymor was the creative genius behind the Broadway stage production of The Lion King, and the deliciously over-the-top Shakespearean bloodbath that was the movie Titus. Here she draws a bead on the legendary Beatles songbook, building it into a boy-meets-girl story set in the turmoil of the middle ‘60s.

Jude (Jim Sturgess) is a young working class bloke from Liverpool who comes to America to find the father he’s never met. Lucy (Evan Rachel Wood) is a Breck girl from a Norman Rockwell East Coast WASP family. And yes, they are that Jude, and that Lucy, as the songs will remind us. And they are surrounded with a company of friends and acquaintances whose names roll out of the Beatles tunes like ball-bearings dropping from a high shelf. We will meet a sexy Janis Joplinesque singer named Sadie (Dana Fuchs), a Jimi Hendrix-like guitarist from the mean streets of Detroit named Jo-Jo (Martin Luther McCoy), a cute lesbian cheerleader from the Midwest named Prudence (T.V. Carpio), Lucy’s brother Maxwell (Joe Anderson), the celebrated Mr. Kite (Eddie Izzard), and a Ken Kesey doppelganger named Dr. Robert (Bono), who plies the roads in his psychedelic bus filled with merry pranksters.
Before you can say Sweet Loretta Martin, they’re all living in Greenwich Village, Lucy and Jude have fallen in love, Prudence has the hots for Sadie, Max has been drafted, and the movie is advancing through echoes of A Hard Day’s Night, Hair, Monty Python, Let It Be, and other influences.

The songs – there are over thirty of them – are performed by the characters, not lifted from the old albums. Sometimes they work spectacularly well, as in a U.S. Army induction center rendition of “I Want You”, with Uncle Sam snarling from his famous poster and robotic drill sergeants processing the young men (including Max) off to Vietnam. Sometimes they are thin narrative gruel, as at the opening of the film when Jude sits on a beach quavering “Girl” (“Is there anybody going to listen to my story…”) There are spectacular production numbers, where Taymor’s vaunted visual pyrotechnics are unleashed, and there are wistful low-key numbers.
None of the versions of the songs in the film improve on the original recordings, or claim a Lennon/McCartney number as their own the way Ray Charles did with “Yesterday”. And for far too much of the picture the shortfall is painfully apparent, despite a few welcome breakthroughs like a rousing gospel rendition of “Let It Be” sung over a couple of funerals.

But the picture grows on you, after a while, and in the last third Taymor’s ecstatic vision seems to find its game. It doesn’t redeem entirely the lingering disappointment that dogs the rest of it, but it does provide some soaring distraction. And throughout there are plenty of wonderful moments, such as cameo glimpses of Joe Cocker appearing unexpectedly here and there. But too much of the pace is set by the blandness of the young lovers, and the absence of any emotional identification with the characters. Sometimes there’s a jokiness that seems forced, such as Prudence’s arrival at Sadie’s crash pad through the bathroom window. Sadie asks “Where did she come from?” and somebody underscores it with the obvious response.

If you never liked the Beatles, there won’t be much of an incentive to sit through two hours and eleven minutes of Taymor’s interpretation of their music (she won a battle with the studio to resist deeper cutting, and the movie suffers from excessive length.) If you’re a Beatles fan, you may be put off by the sometimes lackluster renditions of their material, though a young friend of mine said she had grown up listening to the Beatles, and this movie helped give her a sense of the context of the times in which they were living and writing and recording. If you’re a Julie Taymor fan, there’s a cornucopia of candy for the eyes.
Paul McCartney, Taymor has reported, watched a screening with her and, when she asked how he liked it, responded “What’s not to like?”
A vote of confidence, or a politician’s non-answer?