Nearly 30 years ago, Michael Schultz, the man who directed the great coming-of-age film "Cooley High,” made possibly the worst movie musical of all time by stringing together some of the best pop songs of all time. "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band,” starring The Bee Gees and Peter Frampton, was an unwatchable and nearly unlistenable meltdown, but this did not warn director Julie Taymor away from taking the exact same approach with "Across the Universe.”
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To be fair, this will not cause the retinal burns and gastric distress that "Sgt. Pepper” did — Taymor is too accomplished a visual stylist to allow her "Universe” to implode completely. But the film does not work because The Beatles did not write these 31 songs to be part of an operetta about love, war and fashion in the 1960s, and no amount of shoehorning and imagistic sleight-of-hand will ever make that true.
Jude (Jim Sturgess) is a dockworker in Liverpool, England, who leaves his dingy life to go in search of his father, an American soldier who left his mother after World War II. After finding only disappointment, Jude hooks up with siblings Max and Lucy (Joe Anderson and Evan Rachel Wood), two privileged kids with wild streaks. Soon, they are living in Greenwich Village with sexy Sadie (Dana Fuchs), JoJo (Martin Luther McCoy) and everyone else in New York named for a Lennon/McCartney character.
The thing is, The Beatles don't really exist in this world. They are like puppet master gods, controlling about 80 percent of what comes out of the characters' mouths. When Jim falls in love with Lucy, he sings "I've Just Seen a Face.” When Max gets drafted, an Uncle Sam poster sings "I Want You (She's So Heavy),” and the "heavy” part comes when — no kidding — Max and his fellow recruits carry the Statue of Liberty through the Mekong Delta.
There are few signs of restraint here: Some characters seem to exist only because Taymor wants yet another song in the mix. Bono plays a messianic blowhard named "Dr. Robert” who also proclaims that "I Am the Walrus,” so that would be a twofer.
The Beatles abuse is not the worst aspect of this film. Taymor skims along the surface of the '60s, which feels more like a worldwide costume party than a transformative period of the 20th century. The singing is solid — especially Wood's — but hardly up to the material. And while Taymor could be given points for audacity, "Universe” is unusually ordinary for such a supposedly bold statement. It plumbs the same '60s cliches as "Hair” and "Forrest Gump,” and the portrayal of urban bohemia feels like a low-rent "Rent.”
Taymor did not learn from history. As it turns out, love is not all you need. The good sense to not repeat cinematic cataclysms is also a plus.
— George Lang
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