"Music's the only thing that makes sense anymore"

Rating: 7/10 (6 April 2008)

It's sufficient to say that I wasn't Julie Taymor's most enthusiastic advocate when I caught word of her most recent film, a story built around an anthology of Beatles tracks. On paper, the idea sounds both brilliant and terrible: I certainly don't consider myself a Beatles aficionado, but, like most of the world, I greatly enjoy listening to their music, and a "re-imagining" of their most famous work could just as easily be interpreted as a desecration of their legacy; after all, how could we possibly envisage anybody but Paul McCartney singing "Hey Jude?" Likewise, it seems a rather odd proposition to employ distinctly-British music as an exploration of 1960s American history, but all things considered, the end result isn't all that bad. Despite superficially being an "extended music video," screenwriters Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais have done a wonderful job at fitting a narrative framework around an extensive selection of songs from the band, and the resultant love story is suitably epic in scope to linger in the memory for some time afterwards.
Young Liverpudlian, Jude (Jim Sturgess), has lived an uneventful childhood in the cold, dreary backdrop of Britain. After he ships off to the United States in search of his American father, he befriends a Princeton dropout named Max (Joe Anderson), subsequently falling in love with Max's younger sister, Lucy (Evan Rachel Wood). If these names are already striking you as vaguely familiar, then you wouldn't be incorrect in guessing that almost every character derived their moniker from a Beatles lyric. The three main characters are very good in their respective roles; Sturgess is the most successful, and, sporting a genuine Liverpool accent, his song renditions come closest to their original versions, and so, by implication, are the best. Evan Rachel Wood brings a graceful beauty to the screen, and Joe Anderson provides the necessary comic relief, though his character sobers up considerably following a stint in Vietnam. Martin Luther McCoy's Jimi Hendrix derivative is also entertaining to watch, but the characters of Prudence (T.V. Carpio) and Sadie (Dana Fuchs) are an annoying distraction, and the latter ruins more than a few perfectly-good Beatles tracks.
There's no doubting that Julie Taymor, working with cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel, has an incredible visual style, and the film's musical numbers are an extraordinary stage-show of lights and colours. Narrative-wise, 'Across the Universe' works most effectively when it avoids straying into spells of inane surrealism, though I was terribly partial to Eddie Izzard's nonsensical spoken rendition of "Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!," which is a supreme piece of random nuttiness. As far as the films of 2007 are concerned, I'd consider Todd Haynes' Bob Dylan biopic, 'I'm Not There,' to be a superior piece of music-based cinema, and my preferred musical would certainly be Tim Burton's 'Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.' Taymor's film loses much of its steam after the first hour, and runs at least thirty minutes too long, but it's such an ambitious piece of film-making that one can only recommend it.