Acting Naturally 'Across the Universe'
Directed by Julie Taymor, of Broadway's Lion King fame, Across the Universe at first looks like a glossy, PG13/High School Musical repackaging of music and sentiments deeply embedded in our generational DNA. Fortunately, it's far better than that. The uncomplicated story about a visiting Liverpudlian named Jude (Jim Sturgess, looking far more like Paul than John) who falls for a Midwestern blonde, Lucy (Evan Rachel Wood), while sharing an East Village apartment with her draft-bait brother, Max (Joe Anderson), is driven almost solely by thirty-one Beatles songs, with the possible exceptions of Bono's trippy "I Am the Walrus" and Eddie Izzard's Monty Python-esque "Mr. Kite." Across the Universe begins with Jude sitting on a beach, head filling the screen, singing a slow, dreamy version of "Girl," which segues to Lucy at her high-school prom, dancing a last dance with her boyfriend who is on his way to Vietnam. Antiwar politics, along with sex, drugs, and rock and roll, are all treated as nonjudgmentally as they were in certain large circles at the time.
A couple of dance sequences are particularly wonderful. An Asian lesbian named Prudence (T.V. Carpio) drifts dreamily and untouched through a football team in full scrimmage while crooning "I Want to Hold Your Hand" to her object of desire. Joe Cocker changes from a panhandler to a pimp to And an Uncle Sam recruitment poster's "I Want You" sets off an inventively choreographed, if frighteningly machinelike, journey that ends with a group of soldiers carrying the Statue of Liberty through the jungles of Vietnam. (A Joplin-like singer named Sadie (Dana Fuchs) and her Hendrix-like boyfriend (Martin Luther) help bring a tougher musical edge to this unabashed Boomer nostalgia fest.) Across the Universe isn't subtle, but it doesn't need to be when you have Joe Cocker transforming from a panhandler to a pimp to a street musician over the course of "Come Together." If anything, the movie is the closest thing in years to the epic and gleefully excessive Hollywood musicals of the forties and fifties, the kind people think they don't make anymore. Well, think again.