Across the Universe, director Julie Taymor’s 1960’s musical featuring only The Beatles’ songs is perhaps the most mixed bag of a movie to come out in 2007. I wanted to like the film more than I did, but its whole is not greater than the sum of its parts. The visuals are stunning and whole scenes work extremely well, reinterpreting many of the songs and drawing the audience into the characters’ world. On the other hand, there is no narrative drive connecting those scenes and the story is predictable. It feels like watching a string of extremely well-made music videos (I’ve put some links in this post, and if you follow them, you’ll see YouTube clips of the songs in the film). At moments, the film comes across as an interesting experiment trying to create a world from within The Beatles’ music and at other moments those same interesting bits feel a tad too clever, with heavy-handed homages. For example, any named character in the film gets that name from a person in a Beatles song. Jude (Jim Sturgess) and Lucy (Evan Rachel Wood) are the protagonists fighting to stay in love. Their friends include Prudence (T.V. Carpio), Sadie (Dana Fuchs), Max (Joe Anderson), and JoJo (Martin Luther). If those names pique your interest, or if you just rolled your eyes at the same idea, it may be a sign of how well this film works for you. For me, I kept expecting Eleanor Rigby to appear. (She doesn’t.)

Across the Universe sets itself in the tumultuous end of the 1960’s. Our hero Jude works in Liverpool (get it?) at a shipyard and wants to go to America in order to find his estranged father who impregnated his mother when his father was stationed in England during World War II. Our heroine Lucy lives in a protected, upscale neighborhood in Anytown, U. S. and her beau just signed up for the army. Her brother Max attends Princeton. Everyone will eventually converge in New York and Jude and Lucy will fall in love. Along the way we also meet Prudence, a misfit in more ways than one in her rural Ohio town, JoJo, a Jimi Hendrix knock off who pursues his musical ambitions, and Sadie, a Janis Joplin-like singer who ends up housing everyone in her apartment.

In the midst of their new Bohemian life, they all encounter the Sixties, man. And that is where this film derails. It has no sense of how to tie everything together aside from the fact that these characters live in the same time period. Prudence, Sadie, and JoJo, as compelling as some of their scenes are, don’t ultimately matter in the overall narrative. JoJo’s story, which begins with riots in Detroit, feels tacked on, as if someone remembered that the Civil Rights movement was a part of the 1960’s. The Gospel version of “Let it Be” is one of the more beautiful moments in the film, but it simply doesn’t fit. Similarly, Prudence’s solo of “I Want to Hold Your Hand” is a terrific recreation of one of The Beatles’ more candy-coated hits, but it, like her character, doesn’t need to be in the film. The story of the civil bedlam of the 1960’s is well-known and has been told countless times. Sometimes, those Baby Boomer nostalgia-fests work and feel fresh, as in the case of Forest Gump, but here, the events of the 1960’s feel predictable rather than inevitable. When one of the characters receives his draft notice, I was expecting it and thought to myself, of course he’s drafted, and the scene carries no emotional weight. But there are aspects of the film that surprised me. At the end, I was hoping for Jude and Lucy to make it as a couple; I believed the basics of their story.

As I said above, the visuals of the film are striking, but like the rest of the film, they are disjointed. At points Taymor and her cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel use a muted, realistic screen and at other points they venture into the psychedelic and beyond. I wish that they had chosen to stay in the surreal so that the more bizarre scenes don’t feel so out of place. When the film shows brief scenes in Vietnam, my friend made a comment that they look like they come from Max Fischer’s play Heaven and Hell in Wes Anderson’s film Rushmore, and that is not a compliment to Across the Universe as it tries to give some serious commentary to the Vietnam War. The film also has some notable cameos from Joe Cocker (my first thought was, he’s still alive?), Eddie Izzard, and Bono, who gives perhaps the best performance in the film as Dr. Robert, a Ken Kesey-type psychedelic guru riding cross country on (what else?) the bus from The Magical Mystery Tour—Bono’s version of “I am the Walrus” is rather entertaining. Again, these sequences don’t seem to fit, but as stand-alone segments, they work. Other notable renditions include, “With a Little Help From My Friends” (that receives a little help from Joe Cocker’s cover) and “Hey Jude.”

I’m probably going to take some heat from this, but if one is going to attempt social commentary, I would argue that The Beatles’ music is not the best vehicle. I understand that they were by far the most popular and most important musical artists of the 1960’s and arguably the 20th Century, but their lyrics aren’t that poignant. Because Across the Universe depends on the depth of the lyrics, the film never really goes beneath the surface. Love may be all we need, but what love is, is never really defined. All that said, after watching Across the Universe, I did feel like listening to some Beatles music.