Across The Universe

I watched this film with Margaret the other day. At least, we watched most of it. I was excited to see it because it's directed by Julie Taymor, who is one of the most interesting directors alive. She love puppetry and wild imagery, she choreographs and designs costumes and scenery. If you've ever read any of Paul Johnson's histories that speak on art you will see that set design is a major chunk of art. Many of the great landscape painters were also set designers.

At any rate, I was excited about it. I am not a fan of Rachel Evans Wood, and I kind of suspected that the film would be pretty trite. A hippy-view of the 60's fueled by Beatles covers... not the greatest plan for a movie I've ever heard. I figured that if anyone could pull it off, it would be Julie Taymor.

At any rate, the film itself.

A lot of people here in Okinawa talked the film up to us, they told us it was really good. Before we saw it they would ask us what our favorite song in the film was, things like that. I have no idea how it got such a military following, but it has one. So one Saturday we popped it in.

The first scene is the ostensible hero, Jude, (Jim Sturgess) singing Girl. It's a nice scene, understated, kind of quiet and interesting. From there you have a ten minute montage of early 60's scenes to various Beatles songs. Not a new idea, but nicely done. Hard to tell what is being said in a few places. Hard to discern the ideas that are being shown, but they are being shown so prettily that you give it a pass.

As the film goes on the pastiches are more and more lovely and more and more chaotic and difficult to decipher. But that's not an issue. I would watch a Cremaster type manic dream, if it was directed by Julie Taymor and had her majestice imagery. But the characters grow more and more self-centered and less and less relatable, until we eventually turned it off, shortly after Bono showed up and depressed us.

The film is INCREDIBLY stupid in parts. The names of all the characters cribbed from Beatles songs. There is Sadie, Lucy, Maxwell, Jude, Dr. Roberts, on and on. There are the usual sops to anti-war protests and the musical revolution of the time. There is a haunting picture of the Watts Riots, but it takes about 5 seconds and then moves into some hippy glorification.

I was incredibly turned off by the characters. I tuned them out and despised them. But over the last couple of days I have been thinking about them. I think that perhaps their point was to be rotten. Maybe their irritating self-centeredness isn't some sort of miscalculation. Maybe it was a reflection of how irritating and self-centered the time really was. Maybe it's a satire on the whole hippy/Baby-Boomer self-absorption.

I like the idea that there was an intentional argument in this film. I like the idea that Rachel Evan Wood's incredibly dull, one-dimensional performance intentionally illustrated the dull, one-dimensional character of the 60's.

I would like to ask someone who was there, was part of the "counter-culture movement" to watch the film and let me know. Any takers?