Insincere shambles with some good bits

Rating: 5/10 (15 December 2009)

I watched Across The Universe at my friend Steve's house last night. While there were elements I quite liked, there was a lot - an AWFUL lot - which I didn't.
Taking the music first, it was interesting to see that what was presented was a mixture of note-for-note remakes and wildly different reinterpretations, and in both cases, some worked and some didn't (I thought Bono sang Walrus well, for instance, but I simply can't take those lyrics in anyone's voice other than John's). I thought all the principals sang well.
Turning to the rest of the movie, it was a shambles. There was nothing wrong with the basic story (by which I mean the love story between Jude and Lucy), but it was decked out with characters and thread elements which went nowhere - Prudence, for instance, a character with no narrative value whatsoever other than to enable two non-plot relevant songs, and Jude's Dad, an interesting plot thread which rapidly became a dead end. The end result rambled, of necessity, what with being loaded down with irrelevancies.
And the incessant naming of characters from Beatles songs became trite - around the 40 minutes mark I started wondering when we were going to meet Rita and Eleanor and Pam and Bungalow Bill... Not to mention the endless quotes - "How did she get here?" "Oh, she came in through the bathroom window." I would have welcomed, "Oh, she climbed in off the fire escape." Above everything, I was irritated at how damn American the whole thing was. Notwithstanding one of the main characters being Liverpudlian, and notwithstanding The Beatles reflecting their times (including the enormous global influence of the USA), they were an English group, and I felt queasy at their music being used to illuminate the USA's internal upheavals over Vietnam, not to mention dysfunctional yuppie family life (Thanksgiving? Not very Beatle-y, if you don't mind my saying). Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais deserve a clip round the ear for the screenplay - try Still Crazy for a noticeably better film from them in the world of rock.