Across the Universe - DVD review

Julie Taymor's musical, Across the Universe, featuring 34 Beatles' songs plus cameo appearances by Bono, Eddie Izzard and Joe Cocker is a film I did not think I would enjoy much.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Across_the_universe.jpg

 I was wrong. I feared that re-done versions of the Beatles' songs would take away from my now-decades long experiences and that the storyline of star-crossed lovers Jude and Lucy would not go far.

I was very very wrong. I have watched it a second time and have viewed the bonus features on the DVD.

The acting, singing and dancing is superb - and this movie is a hybrid  - a very theatrical movie that borrows from Taymor's theatrical upbringing and also from her many years abroad in Indonesia and Asia.

English actor Jim Sturgess plays Liverpudlian Jude, a ship worker who leaves girlfriend Molly and his mother for Princeton University to look for his GI father, the American man who fell in love with his mother in England, nearly 20 years earlier. 

Finding not a man of worldly importance but a lowly maintenance worker, Jude wanders around campus and meets the rebellious, upper-class Princeton undergrad, Max (Joe Anderson).  

Max drops out of Princeton and, together, Max and Jude find their way into the East Village flat of one sexy, 40-something singer, Sadie (Dana Fuchs). Dana Fuchs was selected by Taymor for her previous work as Janis Joplin.

Across the Universe begins in the  early 1960s, the period that typified the 50s and whizzes the audience through the decade in a manner that would usually be improbably quick - but the cultural layering is both subtle and not so subtle, and the audience enjoys this phantasmagoria of a ride.

Max soon receives a notice from - you guessed it - The Selective Service - and promptly tries to think of ways with his friends to get out of appearing before the draft board. The song I Want You is layered with a poster of Uncle Sam and Max's appearance before the draft board. You have to see this scene to believe what happens next.

One of the flat mates, Prudence (T.V. Carpio), suggests that Max tell the board that he 'wants to pillage the towns and rape all the girls and women who look like her ' (she is Asian) and whammy - the painful reference to the My Lai Massacre has just been thrown.

Sadie channels Janis with her booming voice, and then, in a huff - Sadie walks off stage, leaving singing and bed partner Jo Jo (Martin Luther McCoy) alone on stage, as she channels Tina leaving Ike.

JoJo's story in the movie is worthy of a mention. JoJo (who is channeling  a softer Jimi Hendrix),  arrives in New York after his younger brother was killed in the Detroit race riots. JoJo's younger brother is seen, open coffin, in a deliberate reference to the 1955 murder of 14-year old African American Emmett Till by white men in Mississippi.

It is exactly these types of references layered in with the magical mystery tour of singing, dancing and special effects that makes Across the Universe more than just another song and dance movie or much more than another pop movie or another movie referencing the Fab Four.

The dance numbers themselves are worthy of big-time Broadway attention.

Lucy, (Evan Rachel Wood) is the high school student who lives in (a tonyConnecticut suburb, the backyard to NYC) and who takes up with the leader of the student radical group SDR - Students for a Democratic Republic, as the group channels the radical SDS  - Students for a Democratic Society.

What starts out seemingly innocent enough for Lucy and the SDR does not end innocently at all. The protest movement is alive and well.

Yes, Lucy and Jude fall in love. And no, the love story is not simple. They break up at one point, and Jude later finds Lucy at a Columbia anti-war demonstration in which both are arrested. The complication of course, is that Jude is a British subject.

By the time we see Bono -  we are now post mid-1960s in the plot timeline -  somewhere around 1967 - having heard such songs as Girl, Helter Skelter, Hold Me Tight, All My Loving, It Won't Be Long,(performed by Evan Rachel Wood) Let it Be
(performed by Carol Woods and Timothy T. Mitchum),  Come Together
(performed by Joe Cocker and Martin Luther McCoy), and Why Don't We Do It in the Road? (performed by Dana Fuchs.)

Max, Lucy, Jude and others board a 'magic bus' with Dr. Robert, a shaman,  (played and sung by Bono, who - with an American accent, channels Ringo and is even Dylan-esque in his cultural references) who sings I Am the Walrus.

Joe Cocker appears as three separate street characters: Tramp, Pimp, and Hippie.

Selma Hayek appears as 5 digital representations of a nurse in the song Happiness is a Warm Gun. Another stunning set of images of song, politics, dance.

Even though the 34 songs are all songs originally written by Lennon and McCartney between 1963 and 1969, all are redone here as original compositions for the movie. The pace is slower, the songs are all sung live, with only a couple of exceptions.

If you are such a die-hard Beatle fan that seeing a newer treatment of Beatles material seems anathema to you, then I still think you will enjoy this movie. I don't know of one person of the generation who lived this who hates this movie.

If you are a fan of musicals and if you enjoy clever 1960s references, then you will  enjoy this movie. The famous song featuring Lucy only appears in the credits with Bono singing it.

Other featured songs include Revolution, While My Guitar Gently Weeps (as a tribute to MLK),  Strawberry Fields Forever. In the DVD, Jullie Taymor mentions that Strawberry Fields forever was shot live, not as a digital composition, something that surprises all viewers of this fantastic footage, graphic and realistic as it is, like a newsreel.

Stunning. Simply stunning. Art, culture and politics interwoven.