'Across the Universe' wasn't all bad
Sep 26, 2007, 06:00 AM | by Chris Willman
Categories: Film
Maxwell Edison's own silver hammer could not have come down any harder on Across the Universe than did the critics. Director Julie Taymor's Beatles-scored musical, which expanded to a semi-wide national run this past weekend, was just asking for it. The Village Voice's Ella Taylor saw the film's ’60s themes as "smugly condescending to a presumptively know-nothing audience." The Boston Globe's Ty Burr slammed its "blinding combination of artistic ambition, excess, and plain old bad taste." EW's Owen Gleiberman called it a "goofy, pompous, annoyingly boomer-myopic Fab Four musical" and "a Hairy cliché fest." Between those kinds of pans, an admittedly horrific trailer, and a soundtrack album that's fairly nondescript on its own, you may feel like you can safely give this one an all-things-must-pass.
So heed these words, before you write it off like a 1980s Ringo solo album: If you happen to be a Beatlemaniac, or a movie-musicals aficionado — and most especially if, like me, you fall into both camps — you need to get to a theater to see it. This is not to be so contrary as to claim it's a great movie. It really is aggravating as hell, and I don't know that there's anything in the above blurbs that I'd directly contradict. (I recall looking at my watch at about the one-hour point and, upon realizing that the thing wasn't even half-over yet, letting out an involuntary groan.) But there are individual musical sequences in Taymor's movie that are at least as magical and transporting as anything I've seen on screen in the last couple of years. Most of us make up our minds whether we like a movie or not within the first 15 minutes, and for good reason; a filmmaker who doesn't know how to start a movie rarely knows how to finish one. But Across the Universe is radically uneven beyond any other uneven movie I can think of. Appreciating what works about it involves abandoning any of your usual all-or-nothing impulses, living in the moment, and being able to separate what sucked 10 minutes ago from what is transcendent right this second.
Taymor really excels at pulling off two distinctly different kinds of musical numbers. The first is a kind of extremely naturalistic soliloquy. Some of the least showy — but best — sequences in Across the Universe focus on one character, who isn't so much dramatizing a Beatles song as internalizing it, in the same way we do when we walk down the street and truly and completely feel the favorite song that's going through our heads. One of these comes early on when T.V. Carpio, as a high school cheerleader, walks across a very busy football field while singing "I Want to Hold Your Hand," not as the frothy tune we know but a slow ballad of excruciatingly unrequited desire. (The fact that the object of her longing turns out to be a fellow cheerleader is almost immaterial.) And there are a couple of numbers which leave Evan Rachel Wood all alone on-camera, singing a familiar song like "If I Fell," where between the courageously long takes and slowed-down arrangement, we believe that a tune that long ago passed into the realm of baby-boom wallpaper can actually mean something individual to one person, again. (Speaking of falling, I'll admit that I kind of fell for Wood in this movie, much to my surprise, after thinking I'd never be able to watch her again without picturing Marilyn Manson on her arm, or on some other body part.)
There are other numbers here that deliver in a fairly old-fashioned vein, without being either stark or phantasmagorical—like "Hold Me Tight," a long-distance duet set simultaneously at an American sockhop and a Cavern Club-like European tavern, and "It Won’t Be Long," which has Wood interacting with her girlfriends a la the "Tell me more, tell me more!" parts of Grease.
I also liked how Taymor went off on the other end of the scale with the outrightly surreal stuff that predominates later in the movie. (But I grew up on Ken Russell indulgence-fests like Listzomania and Tommy, so sue me.) If you abhor the very idea of a Vietnam battle sequence-cum-musical number, then by all means, steer clear. But part of the marvel of a sequence like "I Want You (She’s So Heavy)" — an elongated military conscription number that begins with an Uncle Sam "I Want You" poster coming to life — is how, for all its over-the-top imagery, it's choreographed and shot like an old-fashioned Hollywood musical.
I'd be shocked if I learned that Taymor hadn't studied the classic films of Stanley Donen, Vicente Minnelli, et al. before making her own excursion into the genre. Say what you will about the possibly overheated conception of these scenes, but she knows where to put the camera, do a tracking shot, and block choreography. This may sound odd, but I even started fantasizing about what the movie version of Hairspray would have been like as directed by Taymor. Okay, so there's not much evidence she commands an overpowering sense of humor, which could have posed a problem. But what was most disconcerting about Hairspray was how over-edited it all seemed, to the point that it was hard to get a consistent sense of the dancing, even though the choreographer (Adam Shankman) was also the director. Taymor at least heeds Fred Astaire's advice about letting us see some whole bodies on screen, and for more than a second and a half at a time. And what a pleasure that is to watch.
Except when it's not. Because Taymor is devoted to putting entire songs on screen and not chopping them up into medleys, a lot of the sequences overstay their welcome. When lead actor Jim Sturgess launches into "With a Little Help from My Friends," it’s exceptionally well-staged for something that could have been even more static, but you know exactly what you're going to get: three and a half minutes of a guy boisterously singing to his buddies about, um, how glad he is to have their help. Inventing characters who are basically caricatures of Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix — only, super-nice and non-self-destructive — to sing material like "Oh Darling" and "Why Don’t We Do It in the Road" makes for some awfully tiresome passages. And the critics haven't been wrong in excoriating the many sequences set to "Let It Be," "Revolution," "Helter Skelter," and the like that frequently threaten to turn the picture into "A Child's Primer on the 1960s."
Stephen Holden of the New York Times had an experience of the movie that was closer to mine than most. "Somewhere around its midpoint, Across the Universe captured my heart," he wrote, "and I realized that falling in love with a movie is like falling in love with another person. Imperfections, however glaring, become endearing quirks once you’ve tumbled. That surrender is the kind of commitment that Ms. Taymor, a true believer in the magic of art, asks of an audience." I related, up to a point — except that I kept falling back out of love with Across the Universe. And back in, then back out… kind of like most real relationships. Some readers might chime in that what I'm describing makes for the perfect DVD rental, where you can just skip through the dross to the good parts — right? Except without the kind of surrender Holden is describing, the sort apt to take place only in a darkened theater with everything else shut out, I'm not sure whether even the most transformative parts will work. So my advice to you, brave Beatlemaniacs and movie-musical mavens, is to get to a theater, be perfectly discriminating about what works for you and what doesn't… and, when you do get to the magical parts — those bits and pieces that remind us how alive to all our senses a great song can make us — turn off your mind, relax, and float downstream, even if just for a few minutes at a time.
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