Across the Universe
Director: Julie Taymor
Rated: M
From Thurs 1 Nov


'Across the Universe' is a musical-film that uses re-worked Beatles songs alongside a standard romantic set-up. The environment here is late-60s, Vietnam-fevered New York City, with loads of idle students un-idling themselves to take up the fight against conscription and the war and other such things. The lovers are Liverpool dock worker and artist Jude (Jim Sturgess), and formerly straight-laced but currently active anti-war American Lucy (Evan Rachel Wood), whose former boyfriend got killed in the war. They hang out with a bunch of other artistically minded types and together do the usual 60s stuff, combining drug- and music-fuelled transcendence with observations on US security politics. There's a normal number of ups-and-downs, conflicts and realisations, but in the end the basic point is that the world is crazy and difficult to change, and thus human connection in love is really the most sensible thing to go for in life.

This film really only has value if watched as a measure of the education and development of its director, Julie Taymor, because there certainly isn't anything in the story or characters or themes of this that's worth taking in. She builds upon the work of her first two features ('Titus', 'Frida'), where particularly in 'Titus' we saw the makings of a fine filmmaker with advanced knowledge of set architecture and form in general. Both those films showed also that she was having trouble shaking off her background in theatre, with their competent but too-objective camera. In 'Across the Universe' Taymor adopts a more mobile and design-oriented policy towards the camera, while at the same time, unfortunately, reverting architecturally by backing off a bit in the set department. Overall this probably counts as a progression though, because knowing how to move a camera in cinematic space is more important than what is literally in the space, and in any case her sets are still stunning in places. When a filmmaker can master both, the results can be stunning (see: 'Rear Window', Orson Welles' 'Othello'), and fortunately Taymor looks to be heading in this direction.

As a matter of fact all of 'Across the Universe' feels as if it's simply a practise run for Taymor to refine these things. It's probably reasonable to conclude she's consciously approached it as such, because it's beyond imagination that a filmmaker as advanced and self-aware as she is could be interested in such ultra-vapid musical trash.

While a film that's simply a rehearsal for some visual techniques isn't the sort of thing audiences are likely to warm to - unless somehow they're actually sucked-in by the nostalgia and cheesiness - it is certainly good for cinema in the long term. If we can put up with and pay for (because she wont be making many more films if we don't show the money-bosses we like her) this sort of trash now, down the track we could get a whole load of formidable film.

William McGinley