There is a game that I used to play with my friends. We would try to speak only using the lyrics of a song. For example, I would say, “Brandy she’s a fine,” and my friend would reply, “What a good wife she would be.”
The conversations rarely made sense, but it was more of an exercise to see if we could remember all the lyrics. Julie Taymor’s “Across the Universe” is an expansion of this game creating an entire film around Beatles songs. The musical uses only Beatles songs performed by the cast, much like the hit pop-culture musical “Moulin Rouge.”
“Universe” follows the stories of two teenagers coming of age in the 1960s. Lucy (Rachel Even Wood) is a good girl who turns rebel after her high school sweetheart dies in Vietnam. Jude (Jim Sturgess) is a dockworker who comes to America to find his father. The two meet through Lucy’s brother Max (Joe Anderson) and fall in love. What follows is a drugged-out psychedelic fantasy mixed with the realities of war in the ’60s.
At times, it feels like Taymor leans too much on the songs and references to carry the film rather than the story itself. Jude and Lucy’s relationship is understood to be love but is never felt.
“Universe” appears to be pushing for the Genesis record of the number of Beatles songs and references used in a two-hour period. Most of the characters are named after Beatles songs as a way to include the referenced songs, except “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” which is curiously missing from “Universe.”
The little dialogue there is often comes from lyrics to Beatles songs. At one point, the character of Prudence, yes after the song, crawls through the window and then the obvious line that follows is, “She came in through the bathroom window.”
It is difficult to tell if the weaving of Beatles songs throughout the film shows the genious of Taymor or the genius of the Beatles for writing incredible songs that reached so many people. Either way, it proves to be an interesting and enjoyable experience. Taymor provides the visual effects the Beatles wish they had access to on “Magical Mystery Tour.” Although the visuals don’t always make sense, they capture the feeling of ’60s drug escapism.
What “Universe” lacks in dialogue, it makes up in visual spectacle. Often the visuals say more about the scene than any sentence could ever do. In one scene the troops in Vietnam are depicted carrying the Statue of Liberty through a jungle. Visually “Universe” pushes the limits of conventional films. Taymor shows that films are not bound by reality and that through abstraction, we can see life for what it really is.
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