Across the Universe

Time and current level of energy do not permit me at this moment to get across what this movie is, but let me just say two things: none of the reviews I’ve read of it have captured what it tries to do, and the show I was at last night (at the Arclight) was sold out. Which, for a movie this deeply weird, is pretty freaking impressive.

I will say this: not everything in the movie works (I’m looking at you, Eddie-Izzard-talking-his-way-through-“Mr.-Kite”), but even when concepts fall on their faces, they never do it in quite the way you expect them to and it turns out that, to continue the metaphor, when they fall on their faces there’s always something interesting on their backsides as well. It’s a big, ambitious, difficult-to-dismiss movie and the first movie in a long, long time that actually kept my wife and I talking about it for the entire drive back to Santa Monica.

I will say another thing: it shocks me, shocks me, that, at this late date, I can happen upon a movie that actually makes me hear Beatles songs in a new light. I’ve heard these songs literally thousands of times, in both the original recordings and dozens of cover versions, and time after time during Across the Universe I found myself thinking “Hey, that song’s a lot better than I thought it was” or “Wow, this song works on a whole different level than I thought it was going to,” or even “You know, I thought I knew this song, but Julie Taymor somehow just made me hear it again for the first time.” Which strikes me as something of a miracle just by itself.

The movie leaps and pounces wildly from idea to idea. Some of the ideas are kind of jaw-droppingly brilliant and inspired, and others make you want to jump up onto the screen and punch the director in the face. Sometimes both at once. I kind of mean this as a compliment.

The story, let me just say, is, erm, quite simple. But I would argue that Taymor wishes it so, the better to get at her real subject. What is her real subject? Well that’s the part I can’t quite put my finger on. She gives equal time to Vietnam, the protest movement, the Detroit riots and the assassination of Martin Luther King on the one hand, and on the other wishes to tell a love story and the tale of struggling artists dealing with issues of commercial success (with the incandescent James Urbaniak as the terminus of 60s commercialism — the “bad guy” of the piece, come to think of it). The movie, it seems to me, takes place in the weird area where the artistic shapes the personal and the personal shapes the political, which is something I haven’t seen presented in a movie in quite this explosive, unpredictable a way before.

I’m told that this movie has been butchered by craven, cruel, Mammon-worshipping demon studio executives, and while I’m curious to see how the original cut went, the movie is also quite long (2 1/2 hours) and doesn’t feel “cut down” at all — quite the opposite, ideas and motifs are given plenty of room to simmer and develop and murmur, submerging in one place and then bobbing up again in another.

UPDATE:

moroccomole

 tells me that this is, indeed, Ms. Taymor’s cut.  Bully for her!