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| Across the Universe |
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  (6/10)
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Runtime: 131 |
| Public Rating: 8.83 (6 votes) |
Director: Julie Taymor |
MPAA Rating:  |
| Genre: Musical |
Year: 2007 |
| Writer(s): Julie Taymor |
| Reviewed by: Friday and Saturday Night Critic |
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Starring Evan Rachel Wood, Jim Sturgess, Joe Anderson, Dana Fuchs, and Martin Luther McCoy
Director Julie Taymor (“Frida,” “Titus”) gets an “A” for effort with “Across the Universe,” a Beatles-powered and wildly surreal musical about the 1960s. Yet “Across the Universe” is the story of ciphers: the characters are virtually forbidden from doing anything that hasn’t happened a million times before in a standard ‘60s movie. They go to college, grow out their hair, experiment with sex and drugs, rock hard, protest, become disillusioned, fall in and out of love, and none of the grown-ups understand.
The male lead Jude (Jim Strugess; all the characters are named after Beatles songs) comes closest to being an individual; a dirt-poor Liverpuddlian who goes to sea and jumps ship in America looking for his estranged father is more of an individual than anyone else in the movie. His long hair is terrible, while his best friend and possible unrequited love interest Max (Joe Anderson) grows some sweet layers.
Still, this may be Taymor’s intent, to not some much tell a unique story of unique characters, but to riff musically and visually and the standard ‘60s experience. Yet another strike against the movie is that Taymor’s usually explosive and endless visual invention is here only hit-and-miss. She is rather subdued until the characters start doing drugs; I recall a choreographed football practice but little else from the first third of “Across the Universe.”
Francois Truffaut once remarked that he found genre films easier to make than art films, because the structure was already taken care of for him; his “Shoot the Piano Player” is a blast and is nothing but riffs on film noir. Similarly, Taymor’s greatest accomplishment is still her take-no-prisoners debut “Titus,” in which Shakespeare took care of the structure and freed her to create breathtaking byzantine visuals; “Frida,” in which she must construct a story out of a woman’s whole life, finds her a little adrift, and “Across the Universe” more still.
There are, however, instances of brilliance in “Across the Universe:” the draft sequence, set to “She’s So Heavy,” is stunning. It begins in New York with a poster Uncle Sam coming to life, where clone soldiers with jaws like GI Joe drill underwear-clad recruits in choreographed pushups and medical exams. It ends in a gloriously artificial Vietnam, in which the recruits, still in their tidy whiteys, carry the Statue of Liberty across a model jungle. It’s as great a sequence as anything else this year. The singing throughout is good in a kinda bland Broadway sort of way; U2’s Bono shows up for “I Am the Walrus” to show the kids how it’s done.
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