Across the Universe

Across the Universe is an ambitious project: A musical in which every single song was originally recorded by The Beatles. That ambition allows director Julie Taymor to create some particularly memorable moments, but it also ends up being her undoing.

Here's the story, set in the late sixties: An English lad named Jude (Jim Sturgess) travels from Liverpool to America (Princeton, specifically) to find his biological father, who he has never met. While on the Princeton premises, he meets Max (Joe Anderson) a lovable scamp who's part Ferris Bueller and part Zach Morris. Max brings Jude home with him for Thanksgiving, where two momentous things happen: 1. Max announces to his family his intention drop out of Princeton and move to New York City (his parents are understandably nonplussed), and 2. Jude meets and falls for Max's li'l sis, Lucy (Evan Rachel Wood). Max and Jude move to the Big Apple, followed shortly thereafter by Lucy, where they meet Bohemians Sadie, Jo-Jo, and Prudence. Trouble ensues when Max gets drafted, and their differing reactions to this unpleasant reality drive a wedge between Jude and Lucy.

It all sounds pretty well put-together, but it's actually kind of a underdeveloped mess. It's underdeveloped because of the framework Taymor imposed on herself, and it's a mess because of some of the choices she made. We'll deal with each of these in turn.

First of all, there's the problem that, in a musical, most of the dialogue is lyrics, and in this musical, most of the lyrics are Beatles songs. This is not to disparage The Beatles, whom I hold in the highest esteem, but a lot of their early songs weren't that deep and a lot of their later songs weren't that comprehensible. Add to that the fact that some songs just don't perfectly fit, and Taymor is left trying to build a structure out of some combination of Lincoln Logs, Tinker Toys, and melted Legos.

I'll give a case in point for each. First, the early songs actually work the best (and it's probably telling that the musical loses focus part way through, when Taymor eschews everything pre-Revolver). And while "I Want To Hold Your Hand" looks and sounds beautiful when sung by Prudence (T.V. Carpio), it soon becomes apparent that the person she's singing it about will not appear again in the film. At that point, the song can only act as exposition for the character of Prudence, so--while Taymor does manage to add a bit of context through her visuals--all we really get is the fact that Prudence likes to hold hands.

The later Beatles corpus (post-Sgt. Pepper) does not hold up as well. The general abstractness of the lyrics of these songs is effective in evoking a mood or painting a picture, but does very little to move a story along, and the audience is just left scratching their heads as to why one of the characters is singing about, for example, "a soap impression of his wife which he ate and donated to the National Trust."

And then there are songs that work in part but not in whole. When Jim goes to confront a communist-leaning mentor/friend of Lucy's, the choice of the song "Revolution" seems perfectly apt. The verses do work beautifully at building the tension, but then Jim gets to the chorus and has to sing "Don't you know it's going to be all right" when he clearly does not believe this to be the case, and the whole thing just falls apart.

I don't want to give the impression that each and every musical number is an unmitigated failure, however. Lucy singing "It Won't Be Long" as she waits for her boyfriend's return works brilliantly, as does Jim's "I've Just Seen A Face" upon meeting (and falling for) Lucy. The greatest feather in Taymor's cap, however, is her handling of the song "I Want You (She's So Heavy)." Since the song has very few lyrics that go beyond the title, Taymor doesn't have too much directorial gymnastics to do, but she lands the small backflip she does perfectly: The "I Want You" of the song is sung to the just-drafted Max by posters of the finger-pointing Uncle Sam bearing the same three-word slogan, and the "She's So Heavy" is mournfully wailed by Max and his fellow new recruits as they carry the Statue of Liberty through the jungles of Vietnam. It's heady and symbolic and a bit trippy and somewhat reminiscent of Moulin Rouge, but it works.

The same cannot be said about the absolute nadir of this film, a two-song montage tag-teamed by Bono and Eddie Izzard. For reasons never adequately explained, the gang gets onto a very Magical-Mystery-Tour-looking bus driven by Dr. Robert (Bono). Dr. Robert is on a mission to meet with a fellow counter-culture shaman, and he takes the gang along with him, stopping along the way to sing "I Am the Walrus" (which sounds cool, but adds nothing to the story). When Dr. Bono actually makes it to his destination, however, the person who is the entire reason he took this freaking trip won't meet with him. So Bono, inexplicably, just turns his bus around and drives away, leaving the main characters wherever they are. Wherever they are turns out to be the domain of Mr. Kite (Eddie Izzard), who shows the gang what I suppose could be construed as a circus performance set to the song "Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite." This number, however, is both trippy and dull. It's musically somewhat cacophonous ("Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite" is far from the Beatles' best work, and Eddie Izzard pretty much just craps all over it). And on top of that, the entire episode is even more pointless than Bono's pointless "I Am the Walrus" episode.

For all this mess, however, Across the Universe is still a memorable movie, and still a rewatchable movie (provided that the rewatching is done with the knowledge that you'll be viewing a series of Beatles' covers music videos, and not a totally coherent film). The numerical result of this unevenness is a 2, but it's not a 2 borne out of apathy. Rather, it's an averaging of the very good with a very bad, with a couple bonus points thrown on for the ambition of the project and its usefulness as an intro to the Beatles for those few human souls who don't know much of their work (as it was for my colleague, Wicked Little Critta).