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Movie review: “Across the Universe”
BY MAGGIE SCOTT
“Is there anything you didn’t like?” asks the nervous director of Beatles legend, Paul McCartney, after a private screening of her new film, “Across the Universe.” “What’s not to like?” comes the blessing. And, he is right.
When filmmaker and theatrical visionary extraordinaire (The Lion King) Julie Taymor related this story to talk show host Charlie Rose, she was clearly jazzed about her treatment of 30 of the stellar band’s “sacred cows,” otherwise known as the soundtrack of baby boomers’ lives.
This rock opera as Taymor describes it treads new, blazing visual ground and offers some exciting new arrangements of songs like “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” (think slow dance; heartbreak). With touches of poetic unreality, the story is laid out in old-fashioned movie musical fashion with boy(s) meet girl(s), boy(s) get and lose girl(s), all under the cloud of war and social upheaval.
From a cross-section of the U.S. and from working-class Liverpool, the protagonists converge on an apartment in New York’s Village: Lucy (Evan Rachel Wood), Jude (Jim Sturgess), Max (Joe Anderson) and Jo-Jo (Martin Luther McCoy). Yes, Lucy’s beauty and goodness are like diamonds, and Jude will “take a sad song and make it better”.
These two lovers will get under each other’s skin, only to be separated by her fervent anti-war work. Lucy’s brother Max heads for Vietnam as a draftee, where its horrors and his peril will cast a pall in nightmarish images over those he loves.
A record company’s courting will drive a wedge between Sadie and Jo-Jo, a Jimmy Hendrix/Janis Joplin pairing threatened by career ambitions.
Demonstrations, psychedelic trips and all the wild imaginings of minds filled with the thrill of protest, the flame of desire, the ache of loss, the throb of happiness, the despair of fear come alive with every note and frame the genius of Lennon/McCartney/Harrison/Starr and Taymor courses through heart and soul and mind.
A magical mystery tour of the senses not to be missed. A Revolution Studios production, Columbia Pictures release, rated PG-13 for some drug content, nudity, sexuality, violence and language.
