Across the Universe

(I meant to see this months ago; several people I know, including my apartment mate, were involved with this movie, and I’m always curious to see a new work by Taymor. Thanks, melebeth, for finally encouraging me to do so; if anyone in NYC is curious, it’s still playing at Cinema Village.)

The problem- well, the main problem- with Julie Taymor’s Across the Universe is that it’s trying to be two films at the same time: it’s trying to tell a rather sweet, emotional story about a boy named Jude who meets a girl named Lucy (the characters’ names all refer back to Beatles lyrics), while also trying to evoke the 60s themselves- to touch upon events such as Detroit’s 12th Street Riot, student unrest, and Vietnam, as a counterpoint of sorts to the sweetness of the main story. The movie is at its weakest when it does so: it’ll randomly cut to footage of a riot, with no real attempt to explain the underlying issues or give any sort of historical context- it’s simply there to provide a counterpoint for a child sweetly singing “Let it Be.” At times, Taymor can brass her way through these issues on sheer directorial style- I rather liked the staging of “I Want You,” with draftees being forcibly stripped and prepared for combat by soldiers all resembling GI Joe¹, but the movie’s blitheness with these issues often becomes uncomfortable. Also, while visually dynamic (in the extreme), Taymor’s musical staging and camerawork lack the unity of a Todd Haynes or a Baz Luhrmann; she simply seems to approach every new number as a chance to do something psychedelic and crazy, so that this movie simply winds up trying on one look after another- more Beatles hits than you can possibly imagine!

Across the Universe is rather more successful in telling its love story: Jim Sturgess, Evan Rachel Wood and Joe Anderson all evoke their roles winningly, and sing very nicely; if you’re going to make a film about the sweetness of falling in love in the 60s, this is the soundtrack with which to do it. At times, Taymor’s over-the-top approach threatens to throw me right out of the movie: there’s a scene where a young lesbian is plaintively singing “I Want to Hold Your Hand” to the girl of her dreams, which is quite touching in concept... until Taymor decides to stage it with football players tackling each other and doing cartwheels in the background, and it winds up looking like something from a Zuckers brothers movie. Too, the script’s constant references to the songs’ lyrics can be grating and intrusive at times: having a female character climb in through the bathroom window is fairly amusing; having another character point out the joke by exclaiming, “She came in through the bathroom window!” simply italicizes, and ruins, the humor.

Still, the movie has many touching moments- Sturgess’ a capella version of “All My Loving;” Wood’s rendition of “If I Fell”- the most touching version of that song I’ve heard a character in a movie perform since Diane Keaton in Shoot the Moon. Perhaps most of all, there’s a genuinely sweet restaging of the rooftop concert, in which love really is all you need. For all its silly excesses, I’ll forgive Across the Universe a lot for that.


¹This section of the movie owes more than a little to Milos Forman’s version of Hair- and thanks again, interactiveleaf!