Across the Universe (2007)
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'Universe' travels where it shouldn’t
Movie Review:
Across the Universe
By John Wirt
jwirt@theadvocate.com
Advocate movie critic
Photo by ABBOTT GENSER
Clockwise from top: Martin Luther McCoy, Dana Fuchs, R.V. Carpio, Ekaterina Sknavina, Evan Rachel Wood, Jim Sturgess, Kiva Dawson, Joe Anderson and Halley Wegryn Crude in "Across the Universe."
The music of the Beatles is often so brilliant that anyone who alters it or adapts it is asking for trouble. That goes for contemporary recording artists doing remakes as well as the filmmakers behind the Beatles-inspired movie musical, Across The Universe.
The Beatles themselves made only one movie that guarantees a splendid time for all, 1964’s slightly fictionalized day in the life of the world’s most famous pop group, A Hard Day’s Night.
Across The Universe — directed by Julie Taymor, who’s best known for the Broadway adaptation of Disney’s animated musical, The Lion King — hooks Beatles songs to a heavy-handed fictional tale of ’60s youth. There’s love, sex, riots, drugs and a silly plot that, while based on real events and social movements of the time, rings mannered and false.
The concept of using songs recorded by a hugely popular singing group to create a musical has been done before. But Mamma Mia!, a stage musical shaped around the music of ’70s Swedish quartet, ABBA, doesn’t attempt the botched profundity of Across The Universe. It’s simply a fun time at the theater loaded with catchy tunes.
Unlike the stage-bound Mamma Mia!, Across The Universe concentrates on cinematic spectacle, fantastic imagery and social and political commentary. Some individual scenes are imaginative and engaging, even beautiful. In total, however, this stultifying, preachy film is a drag.
The story’s characters are named after characters in Beatles songs. Jude is a young man in working-class Liverpool. He dances with his girlfriend in a club that looks very much like The Cavern while a group that looks very much like the Beatles performs “Hold Me Tight.” It’s a cool, lively, leather-jacket sort of scene.
Across the Atlantic, formally attired American boys and girls are dancing in perfectly choreographed formation at a prom. The severe contrast pounds the point that English kids are hip, American kids are rigid and square.
The American kids include a girl named Lucy. She’ll eventually meet Jude through her rebellious Ivy League student brother, Max. With a little help from their friends, Jude, Lucy, Max and a former cheerleader from Ohio named Prudence experience the tumultuous ’60s, psychedelic bus trips and bloody anti-war protests included.
The cast — including Jim Sturgess as Jude and Evan Rachel Wood as Lucy, U2 singer Bono in a scene-stealing cameo as the Timothy Leary-like Dr. Robert and Joe Cocker in no less than three roles — is universally good, as are the performances of Beatles songs. But Across The Universe goes irretrievably wrong thanks to thin, artificial storytelling and Taymor’s hammer-handed approach to an already floundering script.
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