A romance that emerges from Beatles songs like Venus from the sea.

Rating: 8/10 (1 November 2007)

Directed by Julie Taymor. Written by Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais. Starring Jim Sturgess and Evan Rachel Wood.
"Across the Universe" is a romance that emerges from Beatles songs like Venus from the sea. Young Jude (Sturgess), a shipyard worker in Liverpool, leaves his steady, Liverpudlean girl to look for the father he never knew. He ships out and jumps ship in America to find his father, a professor at Princeton.
Or so Jude imagines. Turns out his father is a janitor at Princeton. He had sired Jude while stationed in England during WWII. Time present is sometime in the mid-sixties. Dad now has a family and has no place for Jude in his life, but he does find a place for him to bunk in the building he maintains.
Some student pranksters hit golf balls from a rooftop, smashing through the window of a fraternity house. In the ensuing chase by frat boys, one of the pranksters, Max (Joe Anderson) is given shelter by Jude. Max has a sister, Lucy (Wood), whose boyfriend is shipped off to Vietnam early on.
Jude and Max become fast friends, and Jude spends Thanksgiving with Max's family, where he and Lucy meet. Max gets his draft notice, burns it, and drops out of Princeton. He and Jude head for New York, where they rent space in a loft run by an aspiring singer and Janice Joplin figure.
The film follows Jude, Lucy, and Max in an exploration of "the sixties", cross-cutting among scenes of football practice, with square-jawed young athletes and comely cheerleaders, to an urban uprising in Detroit, to scenes of campus protest and clashes with police, to battle scenes in Vietnam, featuring Max, who let himself be drafted, despite his attitudes toward the war and authority in general.
All of the venues come together (sorry, Beatles titles are in my head) in one way or another to form a maelstrom that swirls around the young lovers, drawing them in, bringing them together, hurling them apart, then casting them who knows where?
The main set piece features a psychedelic trip, a magical mystery tour on the Merry Pranksters' bus, made famous in Tom Wolfe's "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test". Dr. Robert (Bono) sings and commands the bus as a kind of Ken Kesey figure.
Along the way, they take in a show by Mr. Kite (Eddie Izzard). Words cannot do justice to the visual effects during this trip, and throughout the film for that matter, so I will not do them an injustice. The visuals, however, do complete justice to the Beatles' music and to that whole milieu. The drug-joke is that if you were there, you wouldn't remember. Not true. I was there, and I remember.
Taymor makes excellent use of the music, which outlines the plot. She gives some Beatles numbers a clever twist, as when "I Want You" comes from the Uncle Sam recruiting poster, and sometimes insightful, as when a lesbian cheerleader (yeah, yeah) sings "I Want to Hold Your Hand" from a distance to a stereotypical blonde cheerleader. As Roger Ebert pointed out in his review, the originally upbeat number is transformed into a ballad of longing and heartbreak.
"Across the Universe" is an unabashed musical, right from the opening shot. I recommend it to anyone who was there in those times. For those who were not, I recommend it for its fresh presentation of the Beatles' songs and for its visual delights. For those who abhor musicals, stay home.