Across Generations

Rating: Null/10 (4 November 2007)

I'm at an age where extolling the virtue of The Beatles' legacy and impact on culture can be nothing more than a tiresome exercise in presumption ... something I seem to be guilty of in most of my writings anyway. But as someone from Generation Y, I am apt to admit that I'll never know what it was like to experience The Beatles firsthand. I'm content to say I've made sure to expose myself to that music and indeed I do love it, both casually and as a listener striving to appreciate those sonic innovations the group is reputed to have brought forth.
I do feel a kind of good fortune in my dad having been of that generation and sharing his memories with me. And The Beatles seemed to have been intrinsic to his experiences (my mother -- for her part but not to her discredit -- was on about other things at that time).
If I may be so bold, I think a picture like this is bound to work better for someone my age than for my dad and others of his generation. This is a sentimental mosaic-anthology conceived by minds ostensibly younger than the period it explores, where the music comes permuted and wrapped around visual memes clearly meant to connote the familiar idea of care-free romanticism and innocence frozen for a moment in history, when America was on the cusp of the disillusionment and cynicism that pervades its society today. It was a shifting perspective often sighted in The Beatles' work, with "Rubber Soul" always acknowledged as the turning point in their musical ethos. Surely any young person watching this will not mistake its depiction of '60s-'70s history as anything more than a simplified encapsulation. And for them, as well as the filmmakers probably, that immortal chorus, "All you need is love" may have an untarnished urgency no longer shared by those who feel they went through a kind of collective up-and-down phase along with John, Paul, George, and Ringo.
The movie's boy-meets/loses/gets-girl plot is absolutely standard and without innovation and all the better for it, because the life-blood here is not the story or characters, it's the music. It's the through-line. What you see on the screen are really little more than avatars. Now, those avatars still need to be intelligently designed by the filmmakers for maximized effect, and fortunately that is the case here. Some sequences are flat-out terrific, such as the early scene in a bowling alley ("I've Just Seen a Face") and the later one in a recruitment office ("I Want You"). Some of the actors do their own singing (quite well) while others are dubbed, and though the resulting interpretations don't always coincide with my own (nor yours), that lump is easily swallowed once we remind ourselves of a fundamental aspect of music, which is universality.
Where I think the film might not work for people who lived in the thick of that tempest (maybe I'm wrong) is in the fact that it doesn't end on the note of disillusion which history records. It doubles back with an optimistic conclusion, by which director Julie Taymor -- a most gifted visualist, never more so than here -- isolates the film and confirms it as something hardly representational of that time, as remembered by those who lived through it, but as a euphoric tone-poem kind of reality, experienced through the prism of the era's music, designed to key off emotional -- rather than objective -- notes. I think that's where some are going to have serious problems with this.
But it's no great shakes for me to let that slide. As I write this I'm in my early 20s and whether or not that has anything to do with anything, I know I felt absolutely enabled to have an open dialogue with this picture on that emotional plane. It's a beautiful movie. A romantic, bitter, idealistic, cynical, gritty, trippy, sad, happy, clever, simple, complex, sardonic, sincere, exciting whirlwind of a movie that is all about its music. I walked out of the theater feeling as though my soul had been replenished. The best thing a film of this concept could hope to do is to inspire me in the same way that listening to a Beatles album can inspire anyone, regardless of their age or circumstance. This film achieves that.
Blake's rating: 4 (out of 4)