Across the Universe

When the premise of Julie Taymor’s Across the Universe is described to people for the first time, many see similarities to Bazz Luhrmann‘s Moulin Rouge or the stage musical HAIR. Like Moulin Rouge, AtU takes a series of existing songs, and very famous ones at that, and constructs a story around them, using a highly stylized series of visuals and a vivid color palette to emphasize and enhance the artificial nature of the musical genre itself. The similarities to HAIR stem from the fact that both musicals are set in the midst of the counterculture movement, and opposition to the Vietnam War.

Across the Universe centers on the character of Jude (Jim Sturgess), a young man from Liverpool who comes to America in search of his father, and finds friendship in Princeton drop-out Max (Joe Anderson) and love with Max’s sister Lucy (Evan Rachel Wood). Despite its themes of love and war, despite its beautiful cinematography and design, despite the Beatles‘ impressive songbook, and the movie’s setting amidst one of the most tumultuous times in American history, Across the Universe does not coalesce into a great, coherent whole. It does not match the greatness of Moulin Rouge or HAIR.

To be sure, there are some great sequences, like the scene in which Max is inducted into the army to the tune of “I Want You (She’s so Heavy)” as soldiers carry the Statue of Liberty through war-torn jungles. Another imaginative number features strawberries as blood in the fields on Vietnam. The actors have great voices (something that isn‘t always the case in modern screen musicals), and the orchestrations of the songs are some of the best in the long history of Beatles re-makes. Dana Fuchs (Sadie) and Martin Luther (Jojo) have particularly strong voices. The soundtrack to the film is definitely worth buying.

Unfortunately, moments of inspiration are few, and though the songs work individually, they don’t work in conjunction with each other. Where Moulin Rouge’s storyline managed the seemingly paradoxical feat of both functioning independently of and being advanced by its music, Across the Universe feels like a series of music videos strung together. Several characters exist only to sing a specific Beatles song that bears no relevance to the barely-there plot, as if Julie Taymor were determined to cram as many Beatles songs as possible into the film. For instance, the character named Prudence appears just long enough to have the song “Dear Prudence” sung to her, then disappears from the film almost entirely. Bono and other musicians are featured in wonderful, but extraneous, numbers that halt the momentum of the film.

One of the challenges of making a counter-culture, hippies-in-a-commune film is for the filmmakers to successfully sell to the audience the group of actors onscreen as a community of people that live and spend most of their time together. In the stage version of HAIR, such a community is easily established by the fact that all members of the “tribe” are present onstage for the duration of the show, even when they are not singing or doing anything central to the plot. Such a thing is not always feasible on film, a medium in which actors are called (and paid) only as needed. Film is also a medium that typically (though not always) stresses a couple of individual characters rather than a large group of people. For the film version of HAIR, the narrative of the main characters was enhanced (though not very successfully) to create a more coherent plot, in the hopes that such a plot would compensate for the loss of the stage musical’s live experience with the “tribe.“

Across the Universe offers neither the sense of a commune nor the semi-coherence of the HAIR movie, and characterization suffers as a result. The characters make decisions for no discernable reason, other than to sing a really great tune about them. Such is the case when lovers Sadie and Jojo fight just so the audience can be treated to an awesome stage number. The fact that these characters are barely veiled representations of Janis Joplin and Jimmy Hendricks, respectively, adds to the feeling that we’re seeing a writer’s desperate mash-up of ideas instead of a carefully plotted film.

Across the Universe had all the ingredients to be a great film: a wonderful cast, great voices, a creative director, and wonderful production design. Unfortunately, its strengths are undone by sloppy writing and even worse editing. Taymor seems too close to her material to make objective choices in editing, and the film seems overlong and padded. Watching AtU, a famous quote from Michaelangelo came to mind: ““I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.” With Across the Universe, we got the marble, not the angel.

-Artemis

~ by Artemis on April 16, 2008.