"Across the Universe"

Julie Taymor needs to take some lessons from Richard Lester, the British director who knew exactly how to place the songs of the Beatles in their proper exhilarating context. Look at Lester's "A Hard Day's Night" and "Help," for example, to see the anarchic joy the lads bring to their music. In "Across the Universe," Taymor captures some of the anarchy but none of the exhilaration the music of the Beatles brought to the 1960s.

Taymor's film tells the story of Jude (Jim Sturgess) who journeys from Liverpool to Princeton to find his father. (I found this premise somewhat distasteful as soon as I realized the film had no inrerest whatsover in exploring any kind of missing father-son dynamic.) Once at the university, he meets Max (Joe Anderson) who invites him home for Thanksgiving Dinner where he meets Max's sister Lucy (Evan Rachel Wood) and, of course, falls in love. The three eventually wind up in New York City where they have a series of adventures with a singer named Sadie (Dana Fuchs), patterned after Janis Joplin, a guitarist named Jo-Jo (Martin Luther McCoy), patterned after Jimi Hendrix, and Prudence (T.V. Carpio), inserted because Taymor needed a Prudence to fit the song patterns of the film and because I guess she felt she needed a lesbian to round out her 1960s group of stereotypes.

Under the old adage of "If you can't say anything nice ...," let me say at the outside that, at times, the film is, in parts, visually stunning (but that's Taymor's forte) and most of the performances are spot on.

Having said that, however, this film has problems. This is a musical comprised solely of Beatles songs. But instead of inserting Beatles songs into a proper context within the framework of the narrative, Taymor forces the narrative to follow the songs. And because it seems Taymor insists on forcing as many songs into the film as possible, it runs an unbearably long two hours and 15 minutes, much longer than needed to tell this skeletal a tale. As a result, I lost all interest in these characters and what their outcome would be.

It has been argued that the music of the Beatles is timeless. If this is so (and I'm not arguing it isn't), then why force a Beatles musical into the 1960s? I think by now we know that the 1960s gave us racial conflicts, anti-war protests, hallucinogens, assassinations, the birth of the counter-culture movement and so-on. Do we really have to see it all again, especially without any depth? Why not take the same concept--that the music of the Beatles can tell the story of a life--and set in the present day? Then the music is not a relic, it comes alive.

Grade: C-