A film as utterly goofy and fatally serious as the decade it chronicles, Julie Taymor's
Across the Universe revives the acid musical genre (think
Tommy &
Jesus Christ Superstar) for the 9-11 generation. Take the Beatles catalog, a paper-thin plot performed by pretty, but pretty forgettable young actors, throw in cameos by Bono, Joe Cocker and Salma Hayek and throw in as many puppets, video filters and veiled references to the Fab 4's own history as possible. It sounds like an Odyssey of the Mind challenge and at times that's what this movie feels like: a bloated exercise in whistle-and-bell creativity that never coalesces into anything meaningful. The thing is, I wasn't bored for a second.
I saw the film by myself on Friday night to a sold out crowd of teenagers and young college kids that made me acutely aware that I'm not part of the 18-25 demo anymore. For one thing, nobody laughed when an old Liverpudian tells the film's romantic hero, Jude that he hopes to be happy "when he's 64". Other gags include a girl from Dayton Ohio coming in through the bathroom window and a character named Max at one point picks up his hammer and bangs a bent fan back into shape. I wondered if for many in the theatre, this would be their first exposure to most of these songs. Most critics seem to think the film is squarely aimed at Boomers, but if anything the film seems more a film by Boomers for their kids. "This is what we were about!", the film screams -- leaving the "so what the hell are
you about, kids?" mostly unstated, save one scene where Lucy, Jude's blond-haired activist girlfriend shouts at him in West Village laundromat, "What is ity going to take for people to wake up? Do we have to wait for bombs to start exploding here for people to demand change?" Touche, hippies.
The film is so utterly innocent and uncynical that you could take pot shots at it all day. Bono, sporting a handlebar mustache, sings "I'm the Walrus" on the roof of what I can only presume is Ken Kesey's bus with a bunch of kids on acid. Which is as bizarre as it sounds, but c'mon-- who wouldn't want to see that? Same goes for Joe Cocker singing "Come Together" as a homeless dude--and a pimp---and I think a pot dealer. Hell, any movie with Joe Cocker singing anything is worth the price of admission.
There are darker notes as well. "I Want You (She's So Heavy)" is transformed into a terrifying G.I Joe draft-initiation scene--and when you see the new recruits, clad in Jockey shorts and boxers carrying the Statue of Liberty like waify Atlas's, moaning "she's so heavy", the nostalgia clears the room and you're in 2007 again. The same goes for a sequence that pairs a young (white) soldier's death with the Detroit riots set to a gospel rendition of "Let It Be."
I'm not sure how embarrassing this movie will be for people who lived through the 60s-- it seems the Boomer's have spent every last second of their adult lives trying to forget what happened in that decade (which seems to account for much of our current troubles, if you ask me), but for a younger generation looking to create a world of peace, kindness and meaning, Taymor's film, which is far better than it ought to be, says "All You Need is Love", a statement as impossible, but true as it was when it was first sung.
Labels: film, politics
