A Surreal, War-Torn Love Story Bridges 33 Beatles Songs in a Most Erratic Manner

Rating: 6/10 (12 October 2007)

When I saw the eye-popping clips of this 2007 movie in a preview earlier this year, it became readily apparent that director Julie Taymor has lost none of the visual invention that informs her vivid staging of The Lion King and her Baroque-level approach to 1999's Titus. What I feared most from what I saw was that it would be more like an extended fantasy-laden musical video with the classic Beatles songbook basically providing most of the dialogue. It turns out I am mostly right, though there is a somewhat trite and rather predictable narrative, provided by Taymor and co-screenwriters Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais, at the core of the movie. Building a story around thirty-three unrelated Beatles songs is no easy task, and the contrivances are gratefully not as exaggerated as one would expect. At the same time, the characters feel hastily developed to fit the contours of the diverse songs, and most of the resulting performances are not compelling enough to bring it all together in a cohesive manner.
Set in the 1960's, the plot revolves around Jude, a working-class bloke from Liverpool going stateside to visit the father he's never met, and Lucy, a product of East Coast privilege who becomes increasingly radicalized after her high school sweetheart dies overseas as the Vietnam War keeps raging on. Jude and Lucy meet through her brother Max, a Princeton undergrad who drops out to live in bohemian style in Greenwich Village but then gets drafted into the military. No surprise that a romance between Jude and Lucy evolves amid the anti-war countercultural movement, including a bus trip through psychedelia. There are other characters in the mix with equally familiar names - Sadie, a raspy-voiced Janis Joplin doppelganger about to break big on the rock music scene; Jo-Jo, her lover and competitor who evokes Jimi Hendrix's looks and individualistic guitar style; and Prudence, a sexually confused Ohio cheerleader who literally comes in through the bathroom window.
The love story is strictly by the numbers, but the musical performances can be infectious. Evan Rachel Wood continues to impress even in a role as self-contained as Lucy, and her plaintive rendition of "If I Fell" is surprisingly affecting. The rest are definitely more singers than actors. Jim Sturgess appears to have been cast for his vocal resemblance to Paul McCartney, not a bad reason though he does manage to capture Jude's plot-driven angst with convincing abandon. He gets the lion's share of the classic ballads - "Girl", "I've Just Seen a Face", "Something", "All My Loving", "All You Need Is Love". Joe Anderson delivers a party-hearty "With a Little Help from My Friends" with his Princeton frat brothers and later a somber "Hey Jude" as a postwar-traumatized Max. As budding lesbian Prudence, T.V. Carpio does a doleful version of "I Want to Hold Your Hand" crossing through acrobatic football players during practice. Dana Fuchs brings a soulful thrust to "Helter Skelter", "Why Don't We Do It in the Road?", and "Don't Let Me Down", while Martin Luther McCoy poignantly covers "While My Guitar Gently Weeps".
A few of the sequences don't work as well as others, for example, Jude's extended trashing of the protesters' office to the strains of "Revolution", the pin-cushioned strawberries transforming into bombs during the dual-perspective montage of "Strawberry Fields", and the drug-hazed antics of Bono as a Timothy Leary figure on "I Am the Walrus". Some of the more interesting performances come from the surprise guest appearances, such as Eddie Izzard as the ringmaster of a weirdly psychedelic "For the Benefit of Mr. Kite", Carol Woods and Timothy T. Mitchum delivering a powerful "Let It Be" set against the 1967 Detroit riots, and Joe Cocker showing his unmistakable vocal style under three different guises on a rollicking "Come Together". Even Salma Hayek shows up as a coterie of nurses in a roulette-style hospital during "Happiness Is a Warm Gun". There is a very defined audience for this type of confection, and there are more definitive performances of these classic songs elsewhere. At the same time, Taymor has an audacious visual sense well worth experiencing. Proceed with caution.