Across the Universe

Pure emotion. No one can mix theater with film like Julie Taymor. From beginning to end the film takes you on a psychedelic beatle ride that grips you by the ears, the heart and the soul and never lets go. Even now. Hours after the projector was shut off. Every song adaptation interpretation and setting is spot on, fans of the Beatles will recognize that every detail in Taymor's images recall an instance, a photograph, a line or a quote from the band. Even the girl that comes in through the bathroom window. Nothing is left to chance, everything is on purpose. Amazing. Easily the best film of the year. And in regards to people saying it's a two hour music video.. well... yeah, what the heck were you expecting???

... and it's nanny was Julie Taymor ...

This probably sounds like I hated the film, but I actually loved it.

It has the time line and self-consciously-culture-smart soundtrack of Hair, yet the campy fun and karaoke stylings of Moulin Rouge. Julie Taymor takes this combination and makes it fun, instead of extra cheesy, and it is visually fascinating instead of the obnoxious MTV-video nightmare it could have been.

I cared about the characters - and the cast of 'unknowns' have great star power and voices. Even though I knew exactly what would happen, the journey there was great. The cameos were fun. The lead was sufficiently hot. The soundtrack is stuck in my head as I write this (the new versions, not even the original songs) All corny jokes and references, and lapses in plot are forgiven, because Ms. Taymor manages to take a movie chock full of things that have been done a million times before and makes it as fresh and exciting as if it were all done for the first time. You may know exactly what's going to happen but you never know how. This is the director's movie!

Definitely a movie journey worth taking.

Across the Universe is a love story and musical with creative interpretations of Beatles classics. Critics looker for deeper meaning seem to forget this simple fact. Incredible cameos by Joe Cocker, Bono, and an earth-shattering Gospel version of 'Let it Be', are all in themselves reason enough to see the film. I was lucky enough to see this recently at the historic Elgin theater in Toronto. Julie Taymor is one of the most eloquent directors I've heard to date. Not only has this film advanced the art of film-based musicals, it will most certainly get the Oscar nod and introduce a legion of new young fans to the Beatles. I for one can't wait to see and experience it again!

I'll say up front that this film will almost certainly go on my list of films to see before you die, only one of two that I allow from each year.

Let's get the problems out of the way first.

The overall container of this is a date movie. Boy meets girl. Boy loses girl. Boy gets girl back by professing love in a public venue. Its about as tired a formula as there is.

The songs are produced by T-Bone Burnett, a sort of reliable movieworld musical handyman. He's probably a nice man who once knew what it meant to have soul, but now he's a factory man. These songs are performed by the actors you see, and while admirable, it further diminishes the power compared to the originals. Also, I saw this in a multicinema, and they tend to turn the speakers down because of leakage into other spaces. So the songs here don't have the power we know they do.

Neither does the girl. In other date movies, we are supposed to fall in love a little ourselves, or at least see why she's the object at the center of everything. This actress doesn't have what it takes, and I suppose that's a result of the filmmaker being a woman and openly against objectifying women in this way. So its a bit schizo in that the form the woman chose demands something the woman won't give.

The thing gets off to a slow start. Its probably necessary for the strategy for most of the movie, which depends on growing extremes in cinematic fantasy. But you will probably go through what I did, think during the first 25-20 minutes that I had made a great mistake.

Additionally, there's some bad history in here. Its probably excusable if you consider it all just a shorthand to indicate context. But if you were there and depending on that real context to enrich your experience, you'll be a bit annoyed.

But with those shortcomings (and I'll mention some others), even in spite of them, you'll find this to be one of your deepest cinematic experiences.

Taymor isn't quite old enough to have experienced all this first hand. But she and her team do seem to have gotten the tone right. The world was turning against its inhabitants in a way completely unknown. The youth in the US responded in a way that was deeply moral and committed in a way unknown before or sadly since. This truly was the greatest generation. Think of it: we got rid of a lying scoundrel of a president, despite his best use of unconstitutional force!

Everything was up for re-examination and reinvention. Sure some of this -- most perhaps -- was stupid, opportunistic and damaging. But the imperative to re-invent wholesale was there, however colored by idealism. And this was led by the Beatles. If it hadn't been in the context of reinvention -- if religion in its old form wasn't part of what was tossed -- then surely these guys would have been the core of a new religion. One of their hangers on actually is.

What Taymor is about is a similar reinvention of cinema. She's a risk-taker. She knows her stuff, and she's willing to place it right in that sweet spot between the commercially viable and the imaginatively provocative.

Her tools are derived from Japanese and Indonesian masks, outsized intrusions and a notion of space that prefers enveloping. These three combine to create some amazing achievements in stagecraft. That's what this is all about, stagecraft and the yearning of characters to place themselves in context at the same time the filmmaker (and explicit external world forces) set context boundaries, mostly denoted by uniforms.

The first of these is the most apparent, the first time you'll see this. There are some absolutely amazing experiences in store for you just on this score. The large and small are manipulated and bent to an extreme I have only seen in small bits of Tarkovsky. She knows how and when to combine this with confinement and openness, and often when she does you'll have play with matters of scale that are unique. And its not just one device, but many, never repeated. Its as if a whole life of imagining what to do were collected in one place.

If these were songs by the Mamas and Papas, I'd still be blown away. If it were Robert Stigwood's script maybe even. But those Beatles songs....

With "Rubber Soul," the Beatles started their program to actually write songs that collectively built narratives. John and Paul were obsessed with the power of words that aggregate, and some of their projects really do have a narrative coherence similar to what we can read here, but much deeper than a date movie and a sketch of oppression. So in a way, its a weakness of what she's done to mix songs before that commitment (1966) with those done within it. It fights the DNA of what they created.

And some of the songs carry immediate narrative. "Sexy Sadie" was about the falsity of religion. Here, Sadie is a redheaded Janis Joplin gal. What?

But still, its the stagecraft, and the cosmic placing she's found. See it and have your spatial reasoning ability either broken or enhanced.

See it, and either feel bad about your life or empowered to be.

Ted's Evaluation -- 4 of 3: Every cineliterate person should experience this.

... to have been able to see this film in the beautiful Elgin Theatre with Julie Taymor there to answer questions / talk about the film afterwards (at the Toronto International Film Festival).

Wow!!!

I was carried away, I was moved to tears, I stood up and cheered.

For those who commented about the singing - the actors sang all the songs themselves. What's more, though they did record the songs in studio first as part of the rehearsal process, most of the song performances used in the film were recorded live as they played out the scenes. Perhaps that's why - for me - the songs worked so well; it actually felt like the characters were just moved to sing. Amazing performances from - mainly - unknown actors.

And I felt the story had a strong narrative line, aided / supported by the songs. It used the background of history, not just as a painted backdrop, but to add meaning and depth to the characters and the story they were living. Made me wish I'd been there (born in '65, too young to remember the 60's); I'll have to content myself with living vicariously through Jude and Lucy and the others.

Add to everything else Julie Taymor's glorious visuals, and I was truly swept away. I saw 36 films at the festival, but this was head and shoulders my favourite.

I fell in love with this film, and look forward to sharing it with friends and family who didn't have the luck to see it as I did. It's a film that will, I'm sure, reward repeated viewings.