Across the Universe

“Across the Universe” is a musical that flirts with the stereotype. The songs drive the plot. The dances advance the plot. The journey becomes a joy-ride of popular and not so popular Beatles songs. Unlike your traditional musical where the songs are especially arranged for the plot, “Across the Universe” tests the boundaries of the lyrics’ previous abstract meaning with a tender and often harsh visual reality. But like your traditional musical it is bound to a happy ending. It is overwhelmed by the unnecessarily choreographed passersby, the spontaneous bursts of songs by the characters and the ubiquitous normalization – the singing in public without the slightest social effect.

Julie Taymor’s presentation of the lyrics might spark a cringe or two in die-hard Beatles fans. Nonetheless, the vision is uniquely aligned with the message of the Beatles. They would smilingly approve of the director’s hallucination. The visual effects that accompany the famous songs are psychedelic, ardent, florescent and hypnotically mystical. It recalls the picture where the four Beatles wear the rainbow-intense military costumes. But beware: there is an irreversible taint left in each Beatles song after you watch the film. Let it be, one of the tenderest songs, acquires an emotional crescendo, with chilling delivery by a black boy, when interspersed with powerful images of war, discrimination and death. The soul oozes from the very pores of the viewer’s skin. Hey Jude on the other hand is tainted by the face of the depressed Jude, the deliberate name of the main character, inside a seedy anywhere-bar in London.

Nonetheless, the songs are projected by the honey-covered voices of the young and little known cast. The cast is not limited too the two star-crossed lovers. The cast expands as the songs weave independent stories into an eclectic group of people gathered by destiny, luck, nature, or a screenplay carefully architected. A bumper-jumper college drop-out, an easy-going rock singer, a self-controlled guitarist, a reliable English charmer, a conservative-turned-activist girl, and a sexually confused cheerleader converge to turn the movie into a ride jolted by the ups and downs of the great lyrics of the musicians from Liverpool. This group of talented voices impersonating the lyrics sung, suffers, rises, shakes and tumbles around each other even if distances, corporeal or romantic, tear them apart.

The songs set the pace for the motion of the plot. The plot is tailored to fit the songs. Thus, the story behind the lyrics comes to the forefront as subtle and dispensable, yet inextricable from the lyrics. The English lad, befittingly named June, sets out to America to find his father. Jude finds him as an employee at Princeton University. Jude pleads for nothing but acknowledgement. From there the story spins into a free-spirited, almost bereft of linear thought, ride with Jude and Max. With the help of his friends, Max drops out of college and rents an apartment with the rocker Sadie. Sadie finds the perfect guitarist for her band in Jo-Jo, who lost his younger brother to a civil rights demonstration. Eventually Lucy, Max’s sister finds a comfortable listener in Jude. The Hollywood influence takes Jude and Lucy to make love in bed. At this point of the plot, all the characters have been introduced and have gathered in Sadie’s apartment. Their lives are guided by a levity and freedom to envy. After Max is sent to fight in Vietnam, the group is, inexorably, dismantled only to reconnect in the perfect roof-top-musical ending.

Across the Universe is one of the rare movies in which all the elements of a movie converge coherently to create an atmosphere that permeates through all the specters of the eye with the greatest avail. The accuracy of costume director Albert Wolsky, the double back flips of choreographer Daniel Ezralow, the tactful construction of screen play by Dick Clement, Ian La Frenais and the imaginative guidance of Julie Taymor work in synchrony for the birth of an entertaining film. If you are a Beatles’ sing-a-long-er, an admirer of creativity, a dance functionalist, a fashionist, a hippie era lover, or a drama aficionado, you must see the movie. Just remember, this is an unveiled hallucination of the story behind the Beatles’ story.