Movie Review: Across the Universe

There are a few images from Julie Taymor's Titus that are burned into my brain. A scene where a girl has branches for arms is stuck in my consciousness as much as any scene from Clockwork Orange, and yes that's high praise. Frida had a lot of images too but those are in my mind much more for Salma Hayek than Julie Taymor. Across the Universe got pretty bad reviews and I skipped it in the theater. It got a Best Costume nomination so I watched on DVD.

The film takes over thirty Beatles songs and assembles a story out of them. It seems unimaginative that it's the story of several teenagers during the 60s in Liverpool and the US. Two are in a band, one gets drafted, two fall in love, and one is a war protester and at one point they all lived together in an apartment. It seemed like a cross between Hair and Singles, though it really is assembled like a jigsaw puzzle, trying to find a story through different unrelated lyrics. Given the subject matter they always have the out making the story about a drug trip and they take advantage of that several times, including some guest performances by Bono (I Am the Walrus) and Eddie Izzard (For Benefit of Mister Kite).

There are a few numbers that are really inspired masterpieces. Taymor matched the song I Want You with Uncle Sam on a draft poster. As Max enters a draft office Uncle Sam literally comes off a giant poster to bring him into an assembly line of identically masked soldiers that strip and process him. To bring in the line "She's so heavy" the soldiers are walking across miniature jungles of Vietnam carrying the Statue of Liberty. It's obvious but it really works. It then segues into a different I Want You sung by the young asian lesbian Prudence saying it of straight singer Sadie. Prudence was introduced earlier singing "I Want to Hold Your Hand" taking that previously happy song and making it sad. It never occurred to me that Strawberry Fields could be bloody fields, but I doubt I'll forget that allusion. I've never been a big fan of Happiness Is a Warm Gun" but now that I've seen it as a hospital fantasy sequence with five Salma Hayeks playing nurse I've added a star to it in iTunes.

The cast is all basically newcomers and they do their own singing which is quite good and mostly live and not lip-synced. However, overall I don't think the story is really interesting and the allusions are pretty direct and simplistic. The Beatles are such a defining part of the sixties that to take the music and set it to a rough sketch of the sixties seems redundant. A couple of songs set in new contexts really work, but otherwise it's too long and too unoriginal.