ACROSS THE UNIVERSE (Julie Taymor, 2007) ***

Rating: 7/10 (9 February 2008)

One of my (many) pet peeves with modern movies is their penchant for including redundant cover versions of classic rock songs by today's would-be superstars so as to make them more palatable to mainstream i.e. teenage audiences too young to remember the originals or those who performed them. Needless to say, I was very sarcastic about the potentially disastrous  not to mention blasphemous  idea of making a musical film with the immortal songs of The Beatles (mostly) sung by a group of anonymous young actors. Even if, in hindsight, the film is not without its flaws, I must applaud veteran screenwriters Dick Clement and Ian Le Frenais and director Julie Taymor  not just for their bravery in making this almost impossible task work but because, more often than not, the results are brilliant and occasionally dazzling.
To begin with, 33 songs from The Beatles' repertoire are redressed to suit the actors who perform them and the characters they portray are also named after famous Beatles creations: the main protagonists are British dockyard-worker Jude (Jim Sturgess) who goes to America to look for his janitor father whom he has never met; along the way, he makes friends with spoiled rich kid Max (Joe Anderson) and soon falls for his sister Lucy (Evan Rachel Wood); meanwhile, their sluttish landlady Sadie (Dana Fuchs) is silently lusted after by Asian misfit Prudence (T.V. Carpio) but the former has set her own sights on colored guitarist Jo-Jo (Martin Luther McCoy) whom she engages in her own rock band. The narrative takes on some of the most important events in late-1960s American history  the Civil Rights protests, the Vietnam War, etc.  as Max is enrolled in the Army, Lucy becomes a political radical, Sadie's band are stopped by the police while playing a rooftop concert (recalling The Beatles' own famous farewell performance!), they all ramble through America in a bus and Prudence joins a traveling circus show...
Some of the song numbers are ambitious and inventively realized: it's hard not to love seeing Joe Cocker playing a vagrant in a train station as he twitches himself into the first bars of "Come Together" or having Bono as the eccentric Dr. Robert bursting into "I Am The Walrus" during a psychedelia-tinged party sequence but it's the partly-animated "I Want You (She's So Heavy)" army-recruiting sequence which impresses the most; still, the more pastoral passages like "Because" (sung by the stoned group of friends as they lie carefree on the village green) and Evan Rachel Wood's solo "If I Fell" are quietly remarkable in their own right. However, not every song revisit is a success: circus barker Eddie Izzard's "Being For The Benefit Of Mr. Kite" is surprisingly dreadful, Sturgess' low-key rendition of "Revolution" is ineffective and, unfortunately, "Happiness Is A Warm Gun" (one of my favorite Beatles album tracks) is marred by some uncalled for choreographic gymnastics! Still as a cinematic collage based on The Beatles' Songbook as performed by other people, it's far more successful than it has a right to be and clearly light years ahead of the notoriously abysmal SGT. PEPPER'S LONELY HEARTS CLUB BAND (1978) and, consequently, essential viewing for long-time Beatles fans of all persuasions.