The Perfect Incarnation of a Song, a Testament of Love Surviving So Much

Rating: 8/10 (18 January 2008)

Because this film lingered in my mind because of its brandished originality and progressive contribution to the movie-going experience, I looked through a little bit of history behind the subject matter. As nearly everyone aware of this film knows, it's a musical with a story outlined and directed by a selection of Beatles songs, one of them sharing a title with the movie. In the song, there is a lyric that expresses an overbearing accost of creativity and ideas, "words are flowing out like endless rain into a paper cup." It came to Lennon after the minuscule matter of hearing his wife talking up a storm. That night, he kept hearing those words over and over and took advantage of the indefinite streak of thought, developing it into something of a song. When he was done, he apparently went to bed and forgot about them and in the morning, he found them and brought them to his piano, where he began to play chords, and find pitches to match the words.
This process can be assumed about the way in which this film was made, as its style, spirit, and flow all suggest. The perfect incarnation of a song, an idea very tough to execute but intensely, brilliantly, enthusiastically, very imaginatively, and boldly so by Taymor, and as anarchically as the studio's PG-13 limitations would allow her to. The idea of the premise is something that is hard to imagine sitting down and brainstorming out and rather something that accosts you at any given time, convenient or not, and you can only record what has spilled from your mind at that given moment. The film executes the concept by finding themes, subject, and feelings that match the skeleton that is the outline of all of the songs. One of the most telling keys to the aforementioned is how the story opens with the allegory of an Englishman coming to the US, then proceeding to affect and inspire the lives of a diverse range of Americans he comes into contact with.
Perhaps my favorite part of the film is the Hey Jude sequence. To me, what is portrayed is all that that wonderfully uplifting and energizing song can be about, and consequently a imaginative personification of how it can make you feel.
The film's story, revolving around the arching transformations of our culture throughout the 1960s seen with the focus upon a group of people who become affiliated with each other and drift in and out of each other's lives like the tempests and flights of fancy that were very much what the Beatles' music was for people's lives in that era, which is the central reason why Taymor's vision is so wonderfully ablaze with the true meaning of the word "brilliant." Not just because the premise sounds unfamiliar compared to what we normally see. To me, a director like her is yearned for in the cinema when it comes to giving tangibly emotional identity to feelings and meanings that are hardly thought to be possible to express in movies. Aside from the uniqueness in the importance of the film's axis concept, an important example is the character of Prudence being depressed because of the impulsive heterosexual attractions of Lucy, played by the stunning Evan Rachel Wood, and Jude, played by the potential rather than kinetic energy of Jim Sturgess, and of Sadie (Fuchs) and Jojo (McCoy) and how much more complicated her own sexuality is and how difficult it is to express it even in a time of such sexual freedom and change, and how painful that must be. It's a small part of the story, just like it was a small part of one's attention during that era.
This film goes with its own flow with absolutely no regard for a judgmental view, thus you are forced to go with the flow, take its chances, and accept its rambling taking of license. I admire any film that does so.