Prototype Issue
Here, There, and Everywhere
By Jason Jude Chan
(page 1 of 1)The musical 1960s mounted in 131 Minutes, 33 Beatles tunes, and three holy innocents. —On Across the Universe (while listening to the Beatles)
Like Tom Wolfe’s Day-Glo hippie ode “Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test”, Julie Taymor’s Across the Universe manically manipulates and experiments within its medium—film here rather than the non-fiction novel—to approximate the fervor of the decade amongst decades, the 1960s. And much like Ken Kesey’s epochal insight, that “you’re either on the bus or off the bus,” the musical is as divisive as states of red and blue; that is to say that those on the bus—as reported from print and hearsay—wholeheartedly experience what they deem “enlightenment” and “ecstasy” while those off said bus simply see ahead a histrionic wreck. I am here to say that I am off this jolty juvenile bus and demanding ‘Who’s driving?’
As everyone and their mother should know, Across the Universe attunes to its times; meaning Beatles all the way, all the time. The film is a believed fantastical tribute for Beatles fanatics, featuring names derived from song characters and knowing nudge-nudges of trivia.
It’s an alternate universe with the music of John, Paul, George, and Ringo accompanied by images: perfect symbiosis! But instead it is a peculiarly negative, nauseating note; while the idea is worthwhile and momentarily inviting and inventive (“Because” and “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite”), much of it comes across the screen as repulsively predictable (“Hey Jude” and “All You Need is Love”), gratuitous and ungainly (“Blackbird” and a Lionel Richie-like rendition of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”), or simply spiritless (have your pick).
Songs, in musicals, are meant to develop characters or delve further into the narrative, but when both are absent, well, the characters and narrative instead painfully bend—and break—to accommodate song after might-as-well song. The saddest truth is that the story’s scarce energy resides in these contrived, half-hearted sing-and-dance numbers.
The semblance of a story begins beachside where a woebegone wanderer croons about his lost love—not unlike Ewan McGregor at Moulin Rouge’s own outset. This is usually jocular Jude (charming chap Jim Sturgess) and after a barrage of helter-skelter imagery flashing across the screen—literal tumultuous wave upon cymbal wave of political propaganda and war footage not unalike the Anthology cover collage—the story retraces its chronology.
Getting back, Jude leaves Liverpool, job, girlfriend, and mother in search of his absent American father. This absent father is actually an abject janitor at Yale, where Jude befriends the free-spirited Max (Joe Anderson). Max decides to take Jude home for Thanksgiving, whereupon Jude falls for Max’s sister Lucy (Evan Rachel Wood), whose Army boyfriend is soon easily and sadly a short, stilted boohoo slain in Vietnam.
The scenery sojourns from suburbia to New York City as Max and Jude move into a flat with older, but sexy, Sadie (Dana Fuchs who summons Janis Joplin again after the Off Broadway “Love, Janis”) and are soon joined by soulful guitarist JoJo (Martin Luther), lesbian cheerleader Prudence (T.V. Carpio) and finally Lucy delivering Max’s draft notice and the lest-we-forget love story that the film revolves around.
Meanderings with Dr. Roberts (Bono) and Mr. Kite (Eddie Izzard) pass the time until the film settles on Lucy’s increasing investment in the anti-war movement—after all she lost her “loved” one and perhaps her brother—and the increasing ideological divide between her and Jude, despite their love.
The supposed saving grace of this spectacle, and its supposed outstanding achievement, are the visuals that Taymor, with her flair for theatrics and mind-alt, culls from 60s’ cultural ephemera. But while certain cartoonish effects (poster-like 3-D circus animation for “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite”), contemporary chants (“LBJ, how many kids did you kill today”) and costuming are pitch-perfect, others are arrant kitsch.
Max’s army induction is illustrative of this shock-and-awful: the Expressionist-inspired military maneuver choreography and the subsequent montage of the each body’s mechanization for war are striking, but equally—if not more—shuddering is the 3-D Uncle Sam bellowing “I want you so bad” or half-naked Max and Co. slogging through Vietnam’s napalmed terrain with an all too “heavy” Lady Liberty on their backs, veritable Lilliputians of symbolism.
While one admires the ambition, it is this heavy-handed and hardheaded approach that debilitates the film—a film that tries to please everyone and ends up pleasing only itself. Taymor sees the 60s through a kaleidoscopic vision; in brief, there is brazen lack of control within the film with her tries at insights distorted, delusional, and most awfully, greedy, grasping for but never grabbing everything it thinks to be important.
This is due in part to the writers, Brit-comedy vets Dick Clement and Ian Le Frenais, whose dialogue is as inane as to forget if there was non-musical speech. They angle to give each character an emotional back story, but these trite trips to Detroit or the high school football field do little to prevent JoJo or Prudence from coming off still as cutouts from their respective scenes, as artificial and painstakingly constructed as the pinpoint mise-en-scene.
At its core, Lucy, as played by Ms. Wood, is not the luring, lysergic Lucy of the song; but for a narrative that begins with and literally ends with her—in-the-sky-with-diamonds no less—she needs to be.
While her change from bourgeoisie to bohemian is believable, her otherwise lack of anything beyond her physical allure parallels the film’s ascendancy of image over introspection, similar to the shallowness of 2007’s silly and similarly minimizing Factory Girl.
Worst, despite the too long two plus hours of runtime, the Big Issues of the time remain sketches of something vital, neatly consigned to its melting character pot: Jude (Art, capital A), Max and Lucy (Vietnam), JoJo (Civil Rights), Prudence (Gay Rights), and Sadie (Feminism). Instead of a whole vision, we glimpse fragments of periodic loves and obsessions where nothing is ever clear, everything is blurred and blunted, and no investment, whether emotional or political, is staked; like the introductory waves of rebellion, the film whitewashes and washes over much of what it proclaims to be the 60s.
At one point, to avoid Vietnam—basically unavoidable for any film made in or about the 60s—someone quips to “learn French or die.” This remark brought to mind, for one reason or another, another film limiting itself to the revolutionary times of the 60s while attacking politics, sex, and art.
Personally, ATU is very much the American and musical equivalent to the European—and therefore more political and sexually frank—affair with filmic love in Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Dreamers. But while ATU is all glitz and glamour, masking its inherent emptiness with galore, The Dreamers—though a flawed film itself—deals so honestly with the nostalgia and narcissism of its time and subjects—May ’68!—that its time attains a mythic quality and the film itself the faraway feeling of an ardent love song, for which ATU desperately aspires but is denied despite its efforts. While reaching for revolution, ATU realizes itself only as a three penny operation, a bit like a bus ride noisily rumbling here, there, and eventually nowhere.
P.S. Damn you Bono.
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