2007: Across The Universe

Across The Universe (Taymor, 2007) 1/10

In the past decade, two strongholds of twentieth century popular culture, The Beatles and the Cinematic Musical have reveled in a renewed popularity. In 2000, The Beatles released the popular greatest hits collection 1 and followed it up with a Fab Four-themed Cirque de Soleil show.

Around the same period, the extinct cinematic musical genre staged an unforeseen return into popular consciousness with the critical and commercially successful releases of films such as Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge and Rob Marshall's Chicago.With both The Beatles and the Musical enjoying deserved revivals over the past decade, the implementation of a Beatles-themed musical would appear to be a creative synthesis, especially when helmed by Frida director Julie Taymor who first gained fame for her successful adaption of The Lion King to Broadway.

Instead as Peter Frampton and Bee Gees fronted Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band learned thirty years earlier, Beatles-related films sans Paul, George, John and Ringo are a recipe for disaster. Across The Universe is no exception. With a "plot" loosely fabricated from the remnants of butchered Beatles cover songs, Across The Universe is a emotionally vapid, cartoon parody of the 1960's. Utilizing embarrassingly literal interpretations of Beatles songs and a string of stereotypical Sixties moments and characters, Taymor's film is more Forrest Gump: The Musical than Magical Mystery Tour.

Beginning in a parallel version of mid-Sixties Liverpool filled with an endless array of dock workers, but no Beatles, the film follows idealistic artist and dreamer Jude (Jim Sturgess) who leaves his mother to head to America in order to find his long-lost biological father. Along the way he meets up with naive love interest Lucy (Rachel Evan Wood) and her mischievous brother Maxwell (Joe Anderson), with whom he eventually shares a Greenwich Village loft. The fact they reside above a store called Psychedelicatessen clearly distinguishes Taymor's emphasis on an urban counter-cultural perspective.

Alongside, their Janis Joplin cut-out landlord Sadie (Dana Fuchs), Jimi Hendrix replica Jo-Jo (Martin Luther McCoy) and former cheerleader Prudence (T.V Carpio), the characters participate in a myriad of stock Sixties moments- burning draft cards, doing drugs, sticking it to the man- against a pastiche of the decade's most iconic moments from race riots in Detroit to Martin Luther King's assassination.

Yet, throughout Across The Universe their moments and actions are insignificant, not only because of their ineffectiveness on the world at large, but also due to the paucity of a genuine filmic narrative constructed outside the iconic melodies of a compilation of Beatles melodies. While The Beatles were the soundtrack for many lives during the era, Taymor's absurd reality has these songs as the pre-eminent force in shaping the characters' actions.

In Taymor's narrow "For Dummies" conceptualization of the Sixties, the screen is bombarded with heavy-handed images of protests, radicals, bohemians and anti-corporate and anti-American sloganeering: each outdoing the other in degrees of contextual emptiness and excessiveness. Sequences often emerge not because of their importance to the story, but for their ability to utilize yet another familiar note from The Beatles canon: a concept evinced in particularly dreadful workings of Beatles' classics such as Helter Skelter, A Day In The Life and Across The Universe.

Overflowing with flat caricatures, dreary musical arrangements, dreadfully cliched dialogue and a grandiose sense of self-importance, Across The Universe is a film that attempts to utilize its orgastic bounty of colours and psychedelic imagery to capture the spirit of period. Yet, for all its anti-establishment and anti-commercial rhetoric, Across The Universe is an endemically hollow corporate conception of the decade, tie-dyed shirts and all. Only a somewhat vivid number built along I Want You (She's So Heavy) awakens the rubber souls from their slumber.

Minus an actual feasible storyline that does not need to adhere to a Beatles iPod playlist, Across The Universe is simply a dreadfully misguided mistake. The poor acting, lifeless images, forced script and the failure to develop workable themes and messages within the film is the collective fault of cast and crew. Worst of all, Across The Universe is simply a film without a heart and subsequently without a pulse. Despite all its opulent colour and fanciful sequences, the film is an emphatic bore: a stagnant attempt to re-fashion Ken Russell's sub-Fellini-esque Tommy into the twenty-first century.

Given Taymor's Broadway background, one wonders if Across The Universe would be better suited to the stage rather than the screen. Then again after simply witnessing Bono's cosmically misaligned cameo as Dennis Hopper meets Timothy Leary drug baron Dr. Robert, it is clear cut that Taymor should have not cinematically gone down this long and winding road.

One of the worst and most disappointing films of 2007

* Across The Universe is available on DVD through Columbia Home Video

Copyright 2008 8½ Cinematheque