Across the Universe
Oh, dear Lord, where to begin? Bono in a fright wig as Dr. Robert, singing "I Am the Walrus" on his way to meet the giant blue puppet people? "I Want You (She's So Heavy)" set to an image of US soldiers struggling to carry the Statue of Liberty to Vietnam? "I've Just Seen a Face" as an upbeat dance number set in a bowling alley?
How to describe the blinding combination of artistic ambition, excess, and plain old bad taste that is "Across the Universe"? Director/conceptualist Julie Taymor brought Disney's "The Lion King" to Broadway and Shakespeare's "Titus Andronicus" to the multiplex, but with her latest extravaganza, she merely brings the Beatles to grief. Improperly approached, the movie's a howling camp masterpiece.
Remember the TV miniseries "The '60s" of a few years back? The one that strained all the social, political, and cultural changes of the decade through the life and times of one American family? "Across the Universe" is like that, only with characters who open their mouths and sing Beatles songs.
A Dayton, Ohio, high school girl (T.V. Carpio) turns "I Want to Hold Your Hand" into a downtempo torch song aimed at the blond cheerleader on whom she has a forbidden crush. A Liverpool lad (Jim Sturgess) bound for America croons "All My Loving" to the dollybird he's leaving behind. A girl (Evan Rachel Wood) awaits her soldier boyfriend's return with "It Won't Be Long." And so on.
The idea is that the Beatles' music is so universally known and loved - so tattooed onto our cultural DNA - that it's the bedrock soundtrack of its era. There's some truth to that: If you were alive and had a radio in the '60s, there were the Beatles and there was everyone else. By coursing a half step ahead in musical exploration, the clothes they wore, the drugs and political stances they took, the Fab Four seemed to pull the entire decade along in their wake.
Curiously, "Across the Universe" envisions the Beatles' era without the Beatles actually present - an alternate universe where songs like "Girl" and "All You Need Is Love" are just hanging on the trees, ready to be plucked. It's an interesting notion, and it might work if the movie stuck to the chronology. Lennon and McCartney's tunes evolved in tandem with the cultural explosions they charted - the majestic exhaustion of "Let It Be" could only come after the uneasy fire of "Revolution," not the other way around.
Taymor and her writers mix up the songs, though, and they work in the most groaningly literal manner possible. The artistic Liverpudlian lad is named Jude; the sweetheart awaiting her soldier boy is Lucy. They're star-crossed (Starr-crossed?) lovers introduced by her raffish brother Maxwell (Joe Anderson), who's seen wielding a hammer at one point.
The girl with the crush on the cheerleader is named Prudence; in one scene she clambers through a New York apartment window over the bathtub, and I thought, "Right, she came in through the bathroom window - but no one's actually going to say that, are they?" Oh, yes, they are.
There's sexy Sadie (Dana Fuchs), a brassy belter in the Janis Joplin mode, and her guitarist boyfriend Jojo (Martin Luther), who morphs into a Hendrix type. The movie keeps piling it on, trying to address selling out, turning on, resisting the draft, fighting the man, running away from home, and every other development that merited a Life magazine cover between 1963 and 1970.
The dialogue, accordingly, is the stuff of soap operas and protest signs, and poor Wood gets the worst of it. "Paco says we have to radicalize," Lucy breathlessly informs Jude, shortly after he has designed a hip corporate logo shaped like a strawberry (a la Apple Corps) that somehow leads into "Strawberry Fields Forever." Later she says, "We're in the middle of a revolution, Jude, and you're doing doodles."
A doodle like this, chowderheaded from the get-go, has to be more than a little crazy if it's to work, and at its sometimes best "Across the Universe" dives off the deep end without fear. The results can be inspired: a surrealistic/militaristic dance number to the first part of "I Want You," or, later, a biting fantasia to "Happiness Is a Warm Gun" set among VA hospital beds, morphine drips, and a vision of multiple Salma Hayeks as mother superiors jumping the gun.
Other sequences are just a pox upon the brain and eye: Eddie Izzard in a hideous acid-freak-out version of "For the Benefit of Mr. Kite," for example. Anyway, why this song? Why so few from the enlightened pop craft of the Beatles' best albums, "Rubber Soul" and "Revolver"? Because they're less "important" than what came after? Because they don't lend themselves to Taymor's potted narrative?
In the end, "Across the Universe" is hobbled by its vaguely insulting comic-book version of the '60s and by a humorlessness that can only come from talented people convinced they're creating work for the ages. The obvious comparison is to Baz Luhrmann's "Moulin Rouge," and, like that movie, "Universe" may find favor among impressionable young audiences who weren't there. Luhrmann has a wicked sense of fun, though, while Taymor only has her love for the music and the era. Contrary to what you may have heard, love isn't all you need.
Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com. For more on movies, go to boston.com/ae/ movies/blog.
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