newcritics

I took my 13-year-old daughter to see Across The Universe this weekend, and was surprised to find myself in the midst of a teen-heavy cult audience including several repeat viewers. The film came out three weeks ago, and it’s already a cult? Well, it happens the film is good enough to deserve this status. I had a wonderful time watching it, and I think it’s a good bet that, whoever you are, you will too.

Across the Universe is a Beatles pastiche, but somehow the talent of director Julie Taymor and the passage of thirty years has made this effort as delicious as 1978’s Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was corny. It’s the story, set to well-chosen Beatles songs like “Girl”, “Being For The Benefit of Mr. Kite”, “Happiness Is a Warm Gun” and “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”, of a gang of hip young people in the 1960’s. There’s a Liverpool wanderer named Jude, an American girl-next-door named Lucy, her reckless big brother Max, a lesbian named Prudence, a singer named Sadie and a guitarist named JoJo. And that’s just the setup — you should see the delivery.

Julie Taymor is shameless, but in the best sense (her other acclaimed works include Broadway’s Lion King and the film Frida). As pure entertainment, as an extended high-end music video, this film is a knockout. It goes without saying that the theater burst into applause when it ended. What impressed me most about Taymor’s approach, though, was how openly she swiped one pop-culture reference after another and threw it into this film.

The theater/film references alone are too many to list: the downtown New York bohemian setting tips its hat to Rent; the two main male characters echo the two male leads of Hair, and just as in Hair, one of them gets drafted to Vietnam and the other doesn’t. An amazing sequence set to the great Beatles song “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)” manages to recall the film versions of both Pink Floyd’s The Wall and, in a montage of flashing eyeballs and closing trap doors, The Who’s Tommy. But no movie rock-musicals get left out: even Grease is in here. Then there are the mashed-up Beatles movie references: the Blue Meanies show up as freaky blue creatures, and the Liverpool sequences at the beginning of Yellow Submarine are beautifully photographed in a realistic setting (a submarine propellor, of course, hangs overhead).

I could go on, and on. Timothy Leary and Neal Cassady and Ken Kesey show up (the bus is called “Beyond”, rather than “Further”). The singer and guitarist morph into versions of Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix, and they all do a concert on a roof. It helps a lot that the music is well-realized (and that the song selection reflects a true Beatles fan’s tastes), but in the end what I like most about this movie is its audacity.

It’s refreshing to see Julie Taymor sample so many cultural touchstones for her film so freely, so utterly without apology. In this way it reminds me of the Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique, which is so dense with samples and references that fans are still annotating and analyzing it to this day. I don’t know if anyone will analyze Across the Universe twenty years from now. But I’m pretty sure anyone who sees it today will be glad they did.