 Starring: Jim Sturgess, Evan Rachel Wood, Joe Anderson, Dana Fuchs
Director: Julie Taymor
Year Of Release: 2007
Plot: In the 1960s, Jude is a Liverpool dock worker who sets out to follow his dreams by going to America and finding his G.I. father. While meeting his dad isn’t what he expected, he soon meets college-dropout Joe and together they go off and live a bohemian life in New York, where Jude falls for Joe’s sister, Lucy. With the Vietnam war raging and social unrest rising, the friends’ world is torn apart. And they go through it all singing as many Beatles numbers as possible. |
When Across The Universe was released in 2007, it slipped out onto a few screens with little fanfare, marketing push or critical praise, and made a measly $29 million across the globe. In fact you could be forgiven for now knowing there ever was a musical made full of the Beatles classic back catalogue.
Although Across The Universe is a little bit surreal and was never going to make billions, it’s a crying shame it didn’t do better, as with a bit more belief by the studio, the film could have been a much bigger success, as it’s actually a really good movie.
It’s essentially a jukebox musical that takes the Beatles’ songs and fits them into a story of 60s hippie ideals and social unrest. While many jukebox musicals, such as Mamma Mia, just have a token story that barely exists, Across The Universe is a lot cleverer and smarter than that. Sure it’s a love story, but rather than just using the Beatles songs as a random and tacky excuse to break into song, it actually puts them into the context of the era they come from and follows the preoccupations of the Fab Four themselves, with the plot paralleling where the songs went, from early youthful enthusiasm, through experimentation and the infamous psychedelic phase, to growing political awareness and anti-war sentiment.
While the movie isn’t without its flaws and some sections don’t work (and there are way too many puns on Beatles song names that drop into the film like a thud), it’s nevertheless a pretty smart and entertaining film, and does a lot more interesting stuff with the Beatles’ music than most other jukebox musicals do with whatever band they’re plundering.
At the time of Across The Universe’s cinema release, there were also a lot of Beatles obsessives who moaned that it was rubbish because all it offered was people singing sub-par cover versions of iconic songs. While they’re right about a few (in particular Eddie Izzard singing Being For The Benefit Of Mr. Kite and Bono’s version of I Am The Walrus are pretty rubbish), there are actually quite a lot of wonderful takes on the Fab Four’s songs. I Wanna Hold You Hand is turned into a beautiful and tragic lament about unrequited lesbian longing, Let It Be becomes a gospel cry for an end to racial violence, and Happiness Is A Warm Gun morphs into the rather hallucinatory desires of a drugged-up, hospitalised soldier. There’s also a bizarre but rather brilliant version of Come Together, sung by Joe Cocker, and the whole freaky sequence where Joe gets inducted into the army, set to I Want You (She’s So Heavy), is just fabulous.
Across The Universe definitely suffers from a few problems, including a rather over the top love of metaphor, such as the way too literal image of GIs carrying the Statue Of Liberty across Vietnam, but I would still defend it as an extremely good film and a hell of a lot more interesting and worthwhile than most modern musicals. By using the music that defined the 60s to tell a story that takes you through all sorts of issues that made the decade such a turning point in popular culture, it’s both entertaining and it makes you think.
Oh, and to those people who complained that it was tacky that most of the characters had Beatles inspired names, such as Jude, Lucy, Sadie and Prudence (although no Eleanor Rigby), what the hell did they expect? It would have been more bizarre not to use them.
TIM ISAAC
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