Across the Universe

The jukebox musical has made it to the silver screen.  The band is the Beatles, the narrative is a paper-thin love story set in the sixties, and the director is Julie Taymor--a genius at taking tired commercialism and making it art, as she displayed in her greatest success, Broadway’s version of The Lion King.

Broadway has seen a nonstop barrage of jukebox musicals ever since ABBA’s music served as the inspiration for the highly profitable Mama Mia.  Other ventures have followed, using music by such artists as the Beach Boys, Johnny Cash, Elvis, and even John Lennon (solo).  Most have been disasters, using clichéd story lines fitted around comfortably familiar musical numbers awkwardly shoved into the mix.

Which describes Across the Universe exactly.

However, the film is also a magical mystery tour through the issues of war and activism, told with awe-inspiring visual panache.  As usual, Taymor has applied her theater experience to good effect, using her puppetry and mask skills with digital effects to help create thought-provoking, moving musical numbers.  Her images and choreography transform the seemingly familiar music and lyrics into a collage of startling and insightful reflections on an era.

The fact that the movie is something of a two-headed beast may have something to do with the highly publicized dispute between Taymor and Revolution Studios over the final cut.  But the dichotomy didn’t originate with the editing; I suspect the treatment that Taymor originally received was entitled All You Need Is Love.  Taymor changed more than the title; she attempted to change the tone and message of the movie.  Like any stage director who tries to take a bad script and make it into a good play about something else, Taymor was doomed to be fighting herself from the beginning.

Not that she doesn’t make a good try at it.  She has assembled a talented group of mostly unknown actors for the leads, Evan Rachel Wood the only semi-star among them.  They are supplemented with clever cameos by such notables as Bono, Joe Cocker, Eddie Izzard and Salma Hayek.  I even spotted theater mainstays such as Bill Irwin, James Urbaniak, and numerous Bread and Puppet ensemble members.  As a whole, they all manage to act and especially sing with great emotion and courage (almost all the singing was recorded on set, incredibly).

And when the movie works, it is amazing.  The number “I Want You” starts with an ominous Uncle Sam and continues with a humorous but frightening production number. It portrays the draft as a factory of soldiers that processes young, vulnerable boys like canned products.  And “Strawberry Fields” juxtaposes the images of strawberries, stuck through with pins and bleeding juice, with images of strawberry bombs in Vietnam.

But how to reconcile such content with the film’s laughable ending (spoiler alert: boy gets girl), in which police are turned away by women singing the “love, love, love” chorus from, yes, “All You Need Is Love.”  The characters, whose names forecast their upcoming musical numbers (such as Jude, Lucy, and Prudence), are no more than sketches.  Their story did not capture me, because, I suspect, it didn’t capture Taymor. Taymor is more interested in how the sixties inform our modern era, and I hope she eventually gets a full movie to explore this theme.  For now she seems to be sending a secret message through the cracks of a flimsy Hollywood romance.  “Maybe when the bombs start dropping here, people will listen,” Evan Rachel Woods predicts.  It’s a line that foreshadows our day, and it feels like the line Taymor wants the movie to represent.

                                                           Edward Einhorn