A Splendid Time is Guaranteed For All
Taymor's vision + Beatles music = joy 'Across The Universe'
Visionary filmmaker Julie Taymor's splendid homage to the music of the Beatles and the 1960s is the reason movie theaers still exist; it'll be fun on DVD, but it was made for the big screen.
Unlike the musicals Hair or Tommy, which came to the screen with book and music already entwined, Taymor has the entire catalogue of Beatle songs to play with, and a wealth of Beatle folklore and trivia to salt into the mix with entertaining pizazz, then populates her tale with appealing young actors who do all their own singing. She fouses on the cultural moment the Beatles represent with a slender story about Jude (Jim Sturgess), a Liverpool lad who jumps ship to find his absentee Yank dad, and ends up in a hippie crash pad in New York City with his new best friend, the irrepressible Max (Joe Anderson).
While Jude romances Max's kid sister, Lucy (Evan Rachel Wood), who has lost her high school sweetheart in Vietnam, their tribe expands to include Sadie (Dana Fuchs), a sexy Joplin-esque soul singer, Jojo (Martin Luther McCoy), a musician fleeing riot-torn Detroit en route to becoming a Hendrix-like axman extraordinaire, and Prudence (T. V. Carpio), a little Amer-Asian lesbian from the Midwest serching for acceptance. All of whom are swept into the counterculture of free love, psychedelic drugs, and revolutionary anti-war politics.
The way Taymor deconstructs the music for storytelling purposes—perhaps using only a verse, or a sentence, playing two songs in counterpoint, or relying on a recognizable downbeat or intro to set her mood—is absolutely thrilling. "Hold Me Tight" is a high school prom dance for Lucy, and a sweaty rave for Jude and his pals at a basement dance club (shot on locaton at Liverpool's famous Cavern.) A soulfully slowed-down "I Want To Hold Your Hand" becomes a paean of Prudence's forbidden yearning for another girl. "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" becomes a poignant guitar solo following the Martin Luther King assassination.
Taymor never tries to decode the more obscure lyrics, but uses them accordingly. The crazy nonsense verse of "Come Together" (sung by Joe Cocker in three guises: subway singer, snazzy pimp, and wild-eyed street prophet) accompanies Jojo's first glimpse of crazy city life. Guest stars Bono and Eddie Izzard pop up as dueling LSD gurus, Bono delivering "I Am The Walrus" during a psychedelic bus ride, while Izzard's "Being For The Benefit of Mr. Kite" becomes an animated circus of the mind. She stages a chilling, subversively comic "Happiness Is a Warm Gun" in a VA hospital of fix-hungry vets with a chorus line of hypo-wielding nurses.
When Max reports to the draft board, a choir of Uncle Sam recruitment posters sing "I Want You" as he's processed by a dance corps of life-sized G. I. Joes. In Taymor's most indelible image, as soon as the tune morphs into "She's So Heavy," we see soldiers trampling a miniature Asian jungle underfoot with the Statue of Liberty on their backs.
It can be argued that the enduring Beatles songs require no further enhancement. Or that the complexities of the late '60s are lost as mere background for a silly love story. All of which is true. This is no in-depth cultural document. (Indeed, the scenes of Lucy's involvement with a radical SDS-type group are among the least convincing or interesting.) But as a work of pure unfettered imaginaton, celebrating a musical canon that was lifeblood to an entire generation, Taymor's daredevil wit and bracing visual style are breathtaking.
