Across the Universe
Rated: PG-13
I love The Beatles. If people don't love God, I don't agree, but I can understand. If you don't love The Beatles, you can go to hell. And when I heard that Julie Taymor, the visually inventive mind behind The Lion King stage play and the film adaptation of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus was going to make a musical set entirely to songs of The Beatles, I was as excited as a "blackbird singing in the dead of night." Did that last phrase seem forced? Did it seem like I took a line from a Beatles song and squeezed it into a half-baked narrative? Okay, now take the entire song, do it with about twenty more songs, stretch it out to over two hours and you have the clusterfuck that is Across the Universe. There's not much story to speak of because the film is content to take characters (with names all based on Beatles songs) and squeeze them into whatever plot works best for the film. It's as if someone took their favorite Beatles songs (most of which you'd find on a Greatest Hits collection and a regettable lack of deeper cuts from their albums), wanted to make a movie using all of them, and when it came time to build the story, they just said "Fuck it, I'll get around to it later." They never did. There are no characters in Across the Universe but figures that at best make it to 1.5-dimensional. Jude is in love with Lucy who's becoming a more radical figure in the political climate of the 60s as her brother and Jude's best friend Max gets drafted to fight in Vietnam. Meanwhile, their landlady Sadie is trying to make it as a singer as she develops a relationship with her guitarist JoJo while ignoring the affections of the love-lorn lesbian Prudence. There is barely any character development or even any real emotion from these characters. And whenever there's a Beatles song, the script sticks more to the lyrics than to the spirit of the song. Only when the film breaks free of this lyrical prison and Taymor has the freedom to indulge her surreal artistry does the film truly come alive. When you're watching the scenes set to "I Want You (She's So Heavy)" or "Dear Prudence", there's magic happening on screen. Unfortunately, for every song where the film finally comes together (Right now. Over me.), you'll have to sit through four or five other songs where the character just sings to the camera because the story just barely gave them a reason to a sing a particular song. The setting only hurts the film even more as it plays more like a cliched, text-book skim of America in the 1960s, and at worst, is horribly offensive. For example, in one scene, Jude has just had a fight with Lucy and as he's walking down the street, he sees the news that Martin Luther King Jr. has been assassinated. JoJo (who's black) begins to play "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" and the scene basically plays as JoJo saying "We just lost one of our greatest leaders in the history of America" and Jude replying "Yeah, I just had a fight with my girlfriend so I can relate." While I understand that personal problems don't vanish in the face of tragedy, the best analogy I can make is that if after the attacks on 9/11 you were more concerned about the tiff you had with your signifigant other rather than the state of the country, you are a fucking asshole. Across the Universe is how a child would make a movie out of Beatles songs. She would hear the words, but lose the spirit. She would use the names, but with only as much subtlety as a silver hammer coming down on your head. She wouldn't understand that you have to come up with the best story possible and then find the Beatles songs that fit the spirit of the scenes in that story rather than finding your favorite Beatles songs and hoping you can fit them into a story. There are precious scraps of Taymor's creativity scattered throughout but they're nowhere near enough to sustain a film that so molests the holy ghost of The Beatles that it makes Yoko Ono look like a saint by comparison. Words by |