It's not difficult to describe this movie. It's a remake of Hair with
Beatles songs substituted for the original songs. Oh, nobody had admitted that
officially, but it's pretty much the same movie. In case you've
forgotten Hair, it's a Vietnam-era musical with singing and dancing hippies,
singing and dancing draft physicals, etc. Love stories are interwoven with the
snapshots of the hippie-era cultural landscape. There isn't much more you need
to know. The main difference in the new films, besides the new Beatles
arrangements, is that
Across the Universe has the benefit of hindsight. Over the years, some
memories of events and people which were vivid at the time have faded, and our
images of the late 60s have coalesced into a few shorthand images: Peter Max
posters, Vietnam, Jimi Hendrix, Bobby Kennedy's assassination, psychedelic
images, lava lamps, Janis Joplin, draft notices, Ken Kesey, Kent State, free
love, Che posters, Timothy Leary ... and the Beatles. Across the Universe
populated its scenes with those images and characters. Bono plays a Ken Kesey
clone. There's a Jimi clone, and a Janis clone, and mention of a "Dr. Geary."
The film received about a 50% score at Rotten Tomatoes, but not in the
usual way. More often than not, such a score is the result of many middling
reviews which might have gone either way with a bit of a nudge. In this case
the score resulted from some passionate "yeas" and "nays." Roger Ebert, for
example, gave the film his highest rating (****), saying:
"Julie Taymor's Across the Universe is an audacious marriage of
cutting-edge visual techniques, heart-warming performances, 1960s history
and the Beatles songbook. Sounds like a concept that might be behind its
time, but I believe in yesterday. I was drowning in movies and deadlines,
and this was the only one I went to see twice."
On the other side of the ledger, The Guardian gave the film its lowest
possible rating (1 star out of 5), and Premiere magazine said:
"A few folks I've heard have defended this film on account of its having
its heart in the right place. I don't really know where its heart is, quite
frankly, but I know for sure said heart isn't doing its job of pumping blood
to the brain very well."
And James Berardinelli wrote:
"The songs are a bigger distraction than the visuals. With only a few
exceptions, most of them are out of place. They are shoehorned in simply to
increase the film's Beatles music content. The expected approach in a
musical is for the songs to advance the story. In Across the Universe,
the narrative pauses roughly every seven minutes so the characters can break
into song, then resumes when they're done. This approach makes it impossible
to identify with the characters or be interested in their circumstances.
And, while the singing is of variable quality, most of the dance numbers are
amateurish."
I suppose those reviews may tell you as much about the reviewers than about
the movie. It isn't my kind of entertainment, so I couldn't wait for it to
end, but the film has gigantic positives: director Julie Taymor is brilliant
at staging bold, ambitious, often symbolic visual set pieces and she used 33
Beatles songs in whole or part. Enough people found that entertaining to earn
the film very high ratings at Yahoo and IMDb. The film also has gigantic negatives: it's
virtually humorless, it's too similar to Hair, and everything about its
non-musical content is either patently obvious, completely superficial, or a
60s cliché used as a short cut replacement for actual thinking. And none of the
Beatles songs are originals, so people will have varying reactions to the new
cover versions. I believe that your appreciation of the film will depend how
you weigh each of those characteristics. If you want to be dazzled with an
often surreal visual extravaganza set to Beatles songs, and you don't care
that the songs are performed by others, it's your kind of movie, as it was
Ebert's. If you're looking for an authentic look at the 60s told in music,
just re-watch Hair, which was written by real Age of Aquarians.
