"You didn't get my left nipple right," Evan Rachel Wood says to Jim Sturgess, after a scene fashioned uncannily like the borderline R-rated nude scene in "Titanic". "Sorry. I drew it from a distance," he replies, and therein lies one of the many problems contained in Julie Taymor's 2007 musical "Across The Universe". It is a film that will most likely come and go without consequence--that is, unless it miraculously scores some Oscar nods and its teenage cult following to go with it.
One day, a musical called "Mamma Mia!" came to Broadway and started a trend of jukebox-musicals, shows in which a certain classic artist or group would have their music carefully arranged in a well-advertised production, all with stories we already know. Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, and the Beach Boys all got that treatment. Is it any surprise that nearly all of those musicals, save for "Jersey Boys", either flopped or closed within weeks of their debut? People don't just want songs they already know; they want something else. But then again, "Mamma Mia" is still standing. There must be a reason why. (I know why--I've seen it, and it's oodles of fun.)
The Beatles are arguably the greatest band of all time, partly because they made, at times uncompromisingly experimental, eclectic, and resonating music that continue to shape millions (billions?) of lives. For that reason, it's amazing to think that there hasn't yet been a movie about the Beatles themselves. Or at least, not to my knowledge. Perhaps it's because it's too unwieldy a topic, or perhaps it's because two of them haven't died yet.
Regardless, "Across The Universe" is not the movie to rekindle your love for the Beatles, to start a new generation of Beatles-mania, nor will it be a movie to cherish for years to come. Instead, it's merely a cut-and-paste conversation piece that strangely has a lot of Beatles songs, a film with some nice visuals but almost no flair, and hardly any believable characterization. In fact, it contains some of the laziest mapping of characters I've seen in quite some time in a movie, and I found myself scratching my head every couple of minutes wondering what, and why, things were going on.
Perhaps the most intriguing number in the entire film comes early on. A tan-skinned (Asian?) cheerleader, with two black blemishes on her lips that are never explained, stands on a crowded football field. She begins to sing "I Want To Hold Your Hand," for no particular reason (this is basically how all the songs go). It's an incredibly slow, jarring verison, but we soon get used to it. Then we see her looking at a blonde-haired jock standing with his blonde-haired girlfriend. Hey, typical high school girl crush on the football star, right? But no. He walks away, and in a confusing moment, the two girls lock eyes with each other. The Asian girl turns her head. We realize by the next shot that she's presumably lesbian as she watches the blonde girl practice. "Oh please, say to me, you'll let me be your man," she sings, and I laugh. It's clever, at least I think it's supposed to be, and it's all the more emphasized by her walking along the field as the testosterone-fueled football players tackle each other all around her, letting her pass as they fly across the screen. That's what works for me as symbolism--she has no need for the opposite sex.
But perhaps I'm looking too deeply into it here. Perhaps she's not completely disowning the opposite sex, because the next time we see her, she's escaping from some guy's apartment into our protagonist's apartment through the bathroom window (Beatles reference--get it?). We don't see the guy, we just hear her talk about some guy she's escaping from. I'm guessing that the audience isn't expected to think about this as some sort of character inconsistency, but is instead supposed to laugh at how clever the Beatles reference is. We get it, it's funny, but it's not working. Why does this girl (named Prudence) have black blemishes on her lips? Why is she suddenly in love with Sadie, a prostitute/punk rocker/jungle-fever-girl a few scenes later? Why does she suddenly feel better about everything when "Dear Prudence" is sung? Why is this relevant to me and nobody else? And anyway, the movie treats Prudence's bisexuality too preciously to make any sort of real statement or impact.
The movie is filled with character inconsistencies like those, which ends up taking away anything it could have had if it tried. I wasn't able to invest myself in any of the characters, because I just didn't get why they were doing the things they did. The first time we hear Evan Rachel Wood say a sentence, it's about the narcissism of having children. Her apparent feelings of rebellion in that scene never come up again until much later in the film, past the point where it could have meant anything (try a random 10-minute departure from reality with Bono, who makes a cameo as Doctor Robert, a hippie who drives a bus presumably run by LSD, and exits the film as quickly as he entered). We also don't feel anything at her soldier boyfriend's funeral, even though the movie expects us to. Why not? Because we didn't know the guy. Why should we feel bad for him, or her, for that matter? And it's a motive that isn't really explored. She has very few doubts before she moves on to the next guy. No transition--just a song about her feelings, then cut to making out with him. Yay.
So, I mean, I don't really know what else to say--I could go on for hours about what was wrong with this movie. Most of the setpieces are boring, like a bowling alley that all of a sudden turns into something like a discotheque. Hardly any of the songs have context; the only scene that creates some sense of wonderment, aside from the gorgeous opening shot, is "Being For The Benefit Of Mr. Kite," set to easily the worst song in the entire film, yet manages to be a weirdly fascinating bout of kinetic, frenzied imagination. It's as random as anything else that happens in the movie, yet somehow, it works. Maybe Taymor should have made the movie more trippy, and less drippy.
I began this review with a quote that I was going to use to mention how pretty much nobody in this movie seems old enough to have lived in the 1960s. Well, I just said it, and there you go. I probably know less about the 1960's than these filmmakers, but it seems to me that they certainly had importance. "Across The Universe" does not.
Grade: C-
