Review: Across the Universe

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Jim Sturgess, Evan Rachel Wood, Joe Anderson, Dana Fuchs, Martin Luther McCoy, Bono, Eddie Izzard.  Written by Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais.  Directed by Julie Taymor.  133 minutes.  Rated PG-13. Columbia Pictures. 

A month has passed since I first saw Julie Taymor’s ingenious new movie musical, Across the Universe, and I have yet to get it out of my head.  Weaving together thirty three classic Beatles songs to tell the story of a young British dock worker in love with an socially-conscious, Ivy League refugee, swept up in Vietnam-era protests in New York City, Across the Universe features a talented young musical cast flying high on Taymor’s bittersweet gamble of a movie, built around the Fab Four’s greatest hits, each staged with inventive flair.  

Life working the grimy Liverpool docks takes a turn when young Jude (Jim Sturgess) ventures to the U.S. in search of the father he has never met, where a chance encounter with affluent, freewheeling Princeton drop-out Max (Joe Anderson) leads to turbulent love affair with Max’s young sister Lucy (Evan Rachel Wood), whose own boyfriend has been shipped off to Vietnam. 

The film spends its early sections hurling a handful of characters toward a bohemian Greenwich Village circa late 60s where they form a close-knit, commune-like family of music, art and political activism. Prudence (T.V. Carpio) a teenaged lesbian from Ohio, harbors a secret flame for the head cheerleader (a tender “I Want to Hold Your Hand”), while guitarist Jo Jo (Martin Luther McCoy), flees the battle-torn, civil rights riots of Detroit (a moving “Let it Be” in which Taymor crosscuts a gospel funeral with that of a deceased Vietnam solider).  Soon the entire group is shacked up under the care of aspiring, hellcat rock singer Sadie (an electrifying Dana Fuchs), en route to being the next Joplin with the pipes to get there. 

If you haven’t already gotten the point, the film peppers countless Beatles references throughout from the names of characters—Jude, Lucy, Prudence—to such phrases as “she came in through the window” and “when I’m sixty-four,” none of which feel remotely gimmicky but will likely go over the heads of young audiences. 

The film contains a variety of different movie musical conventions from choreographed production numbers (“I Want You” features a strikingly designed military draft, and “I’ve Just Seen a Face,” is a delightful, acrobatic sequence in a bowling alley) to symbolic music videos (“Strawberry Fields Forever,” in which the fruit bleeds crimson on an artist’s canvas before becoming bombs falling from helicopters), delicate ballads (“Hey Jude,” “Something,”) and rousing concert sequences that raise the roof, performed with gusto by Fuchs and McCoy (the hard-rocking arrangements “Why Don’t We Do it In the Road” and “Helter Skelter”).    

Joe Cocker shows up as three different characters in “Come Together,” Bono is a psychedelic hippie icon in “I Am A Walrus” while Eddie Izzard steps into the film’s most extravagant, Taymor-esque sequence, “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite,” as a flower-power circus barker enveloped in surrealist imagery and puppets while color and animation grip the film.  Taymor, the Tony-winning creator of the Broadway landmark The Lion King, certainly knows her way around a musical and the theatricality of this sequence departs from the rest of the film.    

The mostly non-musical cast does well with the re-arrangements.  A winning Sturgess channels a young Paul McCartney while previously dramatic actress Wood emerges with unexpectedly confident vocal range.  Fuchs, an established rock singer off-screen, is feral onstage.  But it is Joe Anderson as rebellious Max, the idealistic, free spirit later broken in battle, who delivers the film’s best performance in his closing moments of a “Happiness is a Warm Gun,” with a vision of five nurses—all played by Salma Hayek—showing up to deliver a syringe of pleasure and pain to the wounded vet, who memorably comes back to life in his closing moments of “Hey Jude.”   

While her towering Shakespearean adaptation Titus (1999) was an actor’s feast loaded with blazing images and symbols, the reverential biopic Frida (2002) found the director visually tempered and standing a bit too in awe of her subject, rendered dramatically inert.  Across the Universe is Taymor’s most accessible, fully-realized film, and the first to connect with an audience on an emotional level.  She has taken familiar music, a familiar story and context, and delivered something wholly original and hugely enjoyable. 

Across the Universe may be a lot of things: a poem, a dream, an enchantment, a nostalgia and a connect-the-dots fantasia of political and cultural touch points.  Ultimately, Taymor has created a heartfelt melancholia mounted around a simple story, told with exhilarating visual and aural pleasures that stirred me in a way few modern films do.

 Just surrender already.

- Lee Shoquist