Becky and I went on a date last night – dinner and movie I’ve actually been looking forward to, which is rare.  This is a sort of review of that movie.

Synopsis:

Across The Universe is about a group of early twenties Americans and one Brit from Liverpool living during the Vietnam War and civil rights movement.  It’s a musical, the Beatles loving child of Jesus Christ Superstar and Moulin Rouge.  It blends the psychadelic rock and roll moments of the former and the pristine pop orchestrations and vocals of the latter while pumping out nothing but Beatles hits like Helter Skelter, Want You, Dear Prudence, I Am The Walrus (sung by Bono), Hey Jude and Revolution.

Visuals: *****

Across The Universe is directed by Julie Taymor, best known to some of us for creating the broadway version of Lion King.  Like the Lion King, there’s more to see in Across The Universe than there is to hear or be moved by much of the time.  The army induction scene full of cloned soldiers with chiseled jaws, a boy crouching behind a burned out car while race riots roar around him, a transition from a jungle explosion in Vietnam to churning soapy clothes in a washing machine are all mental images that I wish I could have rewound and rewatched.  So much of this movie looks painted that anyone with even a slight interest in visual art would enjoy watching with the sound off.

Music: ***

It’s hard to go wrong with a soundtrack made up entirely of Beatles tunes but somehow this film did.  In between standouts like Hey Jude, Let It Be and Revolution were songs the plot had to turn to meet up with, songs with overtuned mediocre unemotiional and unbelievable vocal performances and songs that were written for an acid drenched era and not a fully sober crowd movie theatre crowd.  Pretty much anything Luci, the female lead played by Rachel Evan Wood, sang didn’t fit the film’s or the song’s character.  I could hear the tuning on her vocals, the transitions between notes being too quick, and her vibrato was annoying.  She sounded to me like a very very good church soloist.  The thing is, this wasn’t church.  This was Vietnam, New York City, a smokey club, a protest and in the middle of it sang Snow White with artificially perfected vocals.  The best performances were by Jim Sturgess, playing Jude from Liverpool.  His voice was perfectly imperfect, like a slightly grunged up Paul McCartney and I believed him when he sang.  His songs weren’t breaks in the dialog but they were dialog and he sang like it.

Plot: **

There isn’t enough plot to merit two and a half hours of film.  It seemed as if the writers began dreaming up this movie by making a list of songs they loved, then made a short list of dream guest singers (Eddie Izzard, Bono, Joe Cocker), then picked the social issues they wanted to preach about (homosexuality, war, race relations, noncomformity and the superiority of artsyness over a regular job) and then sat down to figure out how to get all that stuff into a film.  The plot was shaping up nicely for the first half hour, I was riveted, until Bono showed up.  Then the plot took a hard left for about an hour into an LSD trip inspired bunch of beautiful but superfluous weirdness before veering back on track to wrap up the loose ends from the first part.  Chop out the middle and I would love this film (though the plot would still be a story we’ve heard before).  As is, it’s only two thirds good and sometimes great but always something amazing to watch.

Series: None