Movie Review
Posted by theomnibox on March 16, 2009
Across The Universe
Cross one of the greatest musical catalogs of all time with fine up and coming vocal/acting talent, mix in the turbulent 60s and a tale of discovery and young love and you should have all the elements necessary for an unbelievable love-story/musical. The problem is that as often as not that’s exactly what you get here.
On the surface, this is the tale of a young man named Jude who comes to America in search for his GI father and meets, by turns, a new best friend (a child of privilege fated for the rice fields of Viet Nam), the girl of his dreams (transformed by war and loss into a zealot) and the 60s counter culture revolution with all its highs and lows…emphasis on highs.
The cast is a fine set of mostly unknown, talented, and well voiced actors who move through the movie with the earnest zeal of the original flower children of Godspell and Jesus Christ Superstar. This, oddly enough, is one of the films greater failings. What worked for those earlier productions now seems shallow and forced, partly because the people playing these characters are so completely out of their time and partly, I suspect, because there are some genies that simply can’t be put back in their bottle. We know too much, we’ve seen the ending of this morality play and cannot both suspend the normal disbelief required for a musical AND forget that whatever the promise of that era was it has been lost to us, irrevocably. The result is too often joyless for all its mania and we are left like adults being told a joke by a child who is unaware that we got the punch line before he began the telling.
Another difficulty in the production is that, unlike almost every other musical made in the history of musicals this one a series of songs in search of a connecting plot instead of the other way round. This is frequently the cause of hackneyed twists in the plotline or implausible, sudden and jarring shifts in the larger narrative perspective. Interestingly enough, this also provides us with one of the films few moments that actually works. Bono, perhaps more than a little worn/old for his part, enters the film as a California guru riding a pharmaceutical/magical mystery bus and takes our lovers on a trip, figuratively and literally. His version of I Am The Walrus is at once compelling and pointless, a perfect counterpoint to the faux intellectual rejection of structure that was a hallmark of the 60s. But once this moment ends both the lovers and the audience are left stranded and struggling toward the inevitable conclusion/song lying in wait for the movie’s end.
To get to that ending (our story so far): boy goes to America to meet father and meets friend and partner on a series of adventures. Boy also meets friend’s sister, a grieving and sweet victim of the Viet Nam war. Boy likes girl/likes boy. Friend is drafted while girl becomes increasingly involved in the protest movement and boy makes a living as a starving artist. Girl leaves boy for someone whose zeal matches her own and boy is arrested attempting to save girl from herself. Boy is sent packing by the authorities.
Now we’re all set for the movie’s ending, predictably offered to the tune of All You Need Is Love, wherein our boy is inexplicably allowed back into the country to find girl (who has coincidentally learned her lesson) with the assistance of friend who seems mostly effected by his war experiences in terms of hair and makeup…Too neatly tied together? I’m being kind. By the time our movie reaches its climax and the song its chorus the glaring wound of a problem for this film is in full relief: a truly great song wrapped in presentation that simultaneously fails to understand its heart or relate its hope.
All you need is love? Possibly, but that’s the one thing this movie cannot manufacture for all its pompous circumstance.
