.: Roberts' Reviews - Movie Reviews :.

New on DVD with Mike Lippert

Any form of art is a form of power; it has impact, it can affect change - it can not only move us, it makes us move.- Ossie Davis

If I were mediating a film discussion and the gentleman to my right turned to me and said, "Across the Universe is the most dazzling, beautiful, breathtaking, and original film of the year," I would look him straight in the eye and say, "I agree."

If then, the gentleman to my left turned to me and retracted, "Across the Universe is the most pretentious, overwrought, bloated, and out of control film of the year; an utter disaster," I would look him straight in the eye and without refrain say, "I agree." What a contradiction we have here.

Let's get ourselves on the same level shall we? I am not a Beatles fan. I never have been. I've never really understood or tried to understand why they, above all other rock bands, have become so universally significant on the musical landscape. Certainly Led Zeppelin or Pink Floyd are just as, if not more inventive, better songwriters, and more skilled musicians, aren't they? I don't know, life has just always seemed too short for songs about Yellow Submarines when Bob Dylan was trying to stay Forever Young and Tom Waits had A Bad Liver and a Broken Heart.

Nevertheless, we cannot deny The Beatles what they are, and some, if not many, will find Across the Universe, a musical inspired completely by Beatles songs, to be one of the most touching, moving, emotional, revolutionary, amazing film experience they have ever had, because it brings to visual life some of the most touching, emotional, moving, revolutionary, amazing songs they have ever heard. I didn't start this review with that Ossie Davis quote for nothing after all.

But let's not distribute all the credit in one place. The film as directed by Julie Taymor, that brilliant scenic decorator who helmed Titus and Frida, two of the most beautiful, strange, haunting, audacious films to ever burn their way into mainstream consciousness. Across the Universe, to say the least, is her most bold, daring, transgressive film to date. In terms of absolutely original, audacious musicals, Across the Universe is second only to Alan Parker's imagining of Pink Floyd's The Wall.

The film's plot revolves around a dockworker from Liverpool named Jude who, in the mid-60s, leaves his dead end job in order to venture to America to find his estranged father who has apparently taken up employment at Princeton. After finding out that dear old dad is merely a janitor who has a family of his own, Jude meets Max, a worriless young man with the spirit of Jack Kerouac, who plans on dropping out of school and venturing to Greenwich Village to indulge in a life of art, freedom and revolution. Apparently that's all anyone ever did in the Village.

Max has a younger sister named Lucy (Evan Rachel Wood) who moves with him and Jude to New York for the summer after her boyfriend is killed while serving in Vietnam. There the trio lodge with a group of musicians, Jude finds himself as an artist, Max is drafted for Vietnam and Lucy falls in love with Jude and joins the revolt against the war, all set to the tone of everyone's favorite Beatles songs, which are laced with audacious visuals and show-stopping chorography and art direction.

If there is a fault in Across the Universe it's that it is hard to know if it has anything of much importance to say as a whole besides: All You Need is Love. Then again, maybe The Beatles never did either. Who knows, maybe that is all you need. After all, if Ossie Davis is right, the Beatles have just as much claim to change the world as anyone else. It is certainly an extraordinary, and maybe helpless, task to construct a completely original musical narrative from songs which weren't meant to go together, especially around such an expansive subject like a revolution that occupied the American shores for the better part of a decade. There's that contradiction again.

Critic Jim Emerson once wrote about the great follies of cinematic history: vast, expansive and ambitious; these were films by filmmakers who, at the height of their careers created projects so original, so audacious and so personal that they, for better or worse, without conviction, made exactly the films that they had in their heads, even if they were bound to polarize critics and be destroyed at the box office. Certainly Across the Universe feels like a film that belongs on that same pedestal next to such historical follies like Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange, Bertolucci's 1900, Anderson's Magnolia, and most recently Aronofsky's The Fountain; films that taunt you to hate them but dare you to not admire the hell out of them anyway.

Certainly the only thing more annoying than when I give a film two stars and then talk about it as if it deserves more is when I award one five stars and talk about it as if it deserves less. So why have I provided Across the Universe with the coveted five stars despite a clear hesitation to provide outright praise? Look at it this way: Julie Taymor seems to have been reading from the book of Fellini's Satyricon with great concentration. Like Fellini's most unconventional, beautiful, and uncontrollable film, Across the Universe demands our attention. We'll see it just to know that someone, somewhere still has the courage to make a film like it and there is a certain rewarding quality in that. Its success is that it exists at all. I'd rather see a truly original talent reach for the stars and fail than watch most directors colour within the lines. And if Across the Universe does indeed fail, there is certain reassurance in knowing that it, without a doubt, fails better than any other film you will see this year.