Across the Universe

About Julie Taymor's considerable talent there can be little doubt. Based on design, it extends also to direction; it encompasses stage and screen and even opera. But having a talent and knowing when and where to deploy it are different things. What goes well with lions and elephants, Beowulfian monsters and Mozartian fairytales—even with a painter of the bizarre like Frida Kahlo—does not work in more mundane contexts. Not even Shakespeare's fantastic enough Titus Andronicus could accommodate Taymor's redundant brainstorms.

Taymor's new movie is Across the Universe, which tries to build a scenario from 33 Beatles songs. They are meant to provide the backbone of the story, which the screenplay by Taymor and two old British journeymen, the team of Dick Clement & Ian La Frenais, was to flesh out. Immediately striking is that the press kit, which waxes fulsome about everyone else from top to bottom, has nary a word about Clement & La Frenais, despite their lengthy, albeit very commercial, filmography. Given how forgettable and forgotten that duo's catalogue is, no wonder the press kit stays mum about them. But the film itself makes plain enough that, even harnessed by a driver like Taymor with a gift for musicals, hacks remain hackneys.

Consider the story of this movie musical: Jude, a Liverpool blue-collar worker and illegitimate son of a long-absconded ex-G.I., comes to America in the 1960s in search of his father. Dad is a mere janitor at Princeton U., has a legit family and rejects his unwelcome bastard. But Jude befriends Max, a student hellion, who takes him to his upper-middle-class home for Thanksgiving.

There he meets Max's sister, Lucy, who promptly loses her boyfriend, killed in Vietnam, and forthwith falls for Jude. Max, Jude and Lucy, the latter two now lovers, set up housekeeping in a crazily bohemian New York pad, shared with its owner, Sadie, a tough, swinging nightclub songstress, who gets involved with Jo-Jo, her black guitarist. They are joined in rainbow coalition by Prudence, a pretty Asian-American, who harbors a secret crush on Sadie.

Max is drafted into the Vietnam War, tricks to evade conscription having misfired, and Lucy becomes deeply committed to anti-war protest. So much so that she somewhat neglects her English, and thus uncommitted, lover. When Jude storms into the Students for Democratic Action headquarters and throws an embarrassing scene, Lucy breaks off with him. Tail between his legs, he slinks back to England.

[IMG:R]What next? Do you think that Max dies in Vietnam? That Sadie, wooed by a very uptown record producer, gives up Jo-Jo? That Prudence and Sadie might actually hit the sack? That Jude settles for his abandoned English girlfriend? That Lucy and Jude remain permanently kaput? Think again. Not on your life—or the lives of Clement & La Frenais. But then again, what do you expect from a film wedded to those 33 Beatles songs? You did guess, didn't you, why three characters are somewhat contrivedly named Jude, Lucy, and Prudence?

If you want an uncompromisingly literate film, forget about Across the Universe. If, however, you want to relive the psychedelic sixties (though, prudently, without too much drug addiction), the excitement of students embattled with the pigs, anti-Vietnam sentiments that readily translate into anti-Iraq ones, good old Beatles songs in new arrangements by Taymor's mate, Elliot Goldenthal, go. Enjoy Taymor's far-fetched but fetching inventions: people and places changing colors faster than chameleons, puppets of all shapes and sizes popping up everywhere, fine psychedelic photography by Bruno Delbonnel savvily edited by veteran Francoise Bonot, and rocking cameos by Bono, Joe Cocker, Eddie Izzard, and Salma Hayek—this is your thing.

Take one example of Taymor's associative method, full of dissolves and double exposures. To the song "Strawberry Fields," Jude makes a wall-hung collage of symmetrical rows of pluperfect strawberries pinned to a canvas. The strawberries drip symmetrical juice, which turns into rivulets of blood, the strawberries themselve into wounds, the wounds into exploding bombs. Would a kid like Jude turn conceptual artist? Could anyone find so many identically plummy strawberries? Surrealism, of course; but in this kind of humdrum, kiddie context, surely out of place.

There are good performances by two young English newcomers. Jim Sturgess (Jude) and Joe Anderson (Max) and the sexy Dana Fuchs (Sadie). The much more experienced Evan Rachel Wood (Lucy), I find neither especially talented nor particularly attractive. And the cat-dragged-in cameos leave me cold.

Yes, Taymor knows how to place and move the camera, how to artfully frame a shot. She has one noteworthy innovation: Songs are not disruptively inserted set pieces. Rather, the camera roves freely away from the singer to all sorts of cross-cut places and events, with the song merely providing (not always appropriately) background music. But it is one thing to apply her flights of fancy to animal tales, fairy stories and highly unrealistic operas, and quite another to commonplace people in everyday situations, where they come across as hypertrophic excrescences. Incompatible style and story battle each other to an artistic standstill.