ACROSS THE UNIVERSE [PG-13]
With a story and score derived from the songs of The Beatles, Oscar- and Tony Award-winning Julie Taymor’s latest is a bold and visually brilliant movie musical. Via the simple microcosm of two young lovers, the film sets out on an experiential journey exploring the macrocosm of the passionate and turbulent 1960’s. From The Beatles catalog of more than 200 songs, 33 have been re-envisioned, re-interpreted and organically woven together mapping out the lovers’ fate while illuminating a dark period in our nation’s history.
Given the deluge of “jukebox musical” flops on stage in recent years, like the Elvis tuner All Shook Up! and Beach Boys’ Good Vibrations, attempting one on film would seem like a fools errand to be sure. But leave it to the always groundbreaking Julie Taymor to go down that garden path and from her secret garden of genius grow a thing of awe inspiring beauty and wonder. In short she does to the movie musical what she did a decade ago to the stage musical with The Lion King… completely re-imagines storytelling.
The simplistic story is little more than “boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back,” but told through Julie Taymor’s kaleidoscopic and visionary prism, it evolves and erupts into an evocative epic tale of a time when nothing was “simple.” At once reflective with vibrant images from the past, Across the Universe emits flashes of great clarity on parallel events in our current universe and the chasm in attitudes and actions. Like when Lucy says “I’d lie down in front of a tank if it would bring my brother home from the war.” Jude her boyfriend says “But it wouldn’t,” and a tearful Lucy replies “Does that mean you think I shouldn’t try?”
It would have been very easy for Taymor’s sumptuous day trip to drift off into “nostalgia” or become a “museum piece” with underscoring by “those lads from Liverpool,” but it doesn’t… not for a second. This is due in large part to The Beatles’ music being heard with a fresh “vision” of what they could say and some ingenious new arrangements by Oscar winning composer Elliot Goldenthal. Half the time you never hear the songs coming… or recognize them when you do.
Imagine the song “I Want You,” with a military cadence becoming an induction center horror/fantasy for one character, or the once frenzy inducing “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” in cut time, slowed down to a song of unrequited homosexual love and longing for another, or a gospel rendition of “Let It Be” that can reduce you to tears and you begin to get an idea of the potential “sleeping” within The Beatles music for forty years. Even the straight up rendition of “I Am the Walrus,” in a cameo performance by U2’s Bono as a Ken Kesey proxy acid guru, has a whole new resonance and impact.
Bringing the off screen talent to life is more mind blowing talent on screen than you can shake a bong at. With a virtual cast of unknowns (Evan Rachel Ward of Running With Scissors as “Lucy” and “The Riches” star Eddie Izzard being the exceptions), everyone in the cast is a star in the making, giving luminescent performances, especially leading man Jim Sturgess as Jude.
Sturgess has the charisma, looks, and charm of John, Paul, George, and Ringo rolled into one and the voice to go with it. (If you never understood why girls swooned screamed and cried at the sight of The Fab Four, when you see Jim Sturgess, you will.) A “former” lead singer of a band, until he won a casting competition in the UK for the role of Jude, Sturgess goes from speaking to singing as naturally and effortlessly as breathing out and breathing in and in a way that would put most any Broadway performer working today to shame.
Still, the final word has to go to writer-director Julie Taymor and her wondrous imagination, unfailing eye for beauty in the simplest things, (who else would see the curled edges of a newspaper as gray waves on a deserted shore?) and ability to create awe with her storytelling. To call her a visionary or genius would be repetitive and redundant many times over. Call her a “perceptionary: n. – one who perceives and/or senses the world in brilliant and intricate ways most others cannot.” Thankfully for us, she deems to share them with those who can only hope to… but never will. –Lawrence Pfail, Jr.
Lawrence Pfeil, Jr. is a freelance journalist who has written for several publications including The Edge, SOHO Journal and The New York Blade Newspaper and is a member of the Dramatists Guild of America. He is currently working on his first book.