Across the Universe: One of the most beautiful films I've ever seen

***** (Out of 5)


I had to catch this one before it left the big screen. For the life of me, I can't understand any critic who downplayed this marvel. I don't know what the Beatles think (or would have thought) of this film, but as a fan I think it beautifully captures the thoughts and dreams behind the music.
Some scenes are more stirring than others, but the whole movie pulls you in from the very first scene and doesn't let go for 2:11. Even the final credits are eye candy.
Imagine a Jimi Hendrix-type guitarist playing While My Guitar Gently Weeps in a smoky bar. A gospel choir singing Let It Be after a young black boy gets shot in the Detroit riots. An artist torn by his waning love for a woman and missing his best friend who's fighting in Vietnam, pinning row after row of strawberries on a plain white wall, while the juice leaks down in long red streaks, perfect metaphors for the lives lost in the war.
Jude is a London dock worker, who comes to America looking for his long lost father. His biological father was an American soldier in WWII who impregnated Jude's mother and then shipped home. Jude, thinking he's a professor at Princeton, instead finds his father to be the janitor. While there Jude becomes fast friends with Max, a poor little rich boy who wants to leave school and find himself. Together they move to a rundown apartment in Manhattan with Max's sister Lucy, and then the movie really takes off.
I've seen a piss-poor movie in 1978 that tried to use Beatle music as a story-provider, it was with Peter Frampton and the Bee Gees and called Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. George Burns played Mr. Kite and sang the Benefit of Mr. Kite and you can imagine the hell that was. But here British comedian Eddie Izzard plays Mr. Kite in a psychedelic circus and it is part Monty Python cartoon, part Yellow Submarine music video and it mesmerizes. Bono plays Dr. Bob, who is kind of a Timothy Leary-type and sings I Am the Walrus, but it doesn't amaze you the way you'd think it would. He actually looks like Cheech Marin with his thick sideburns.
Julie Taymor directed this movie and I wish she'd play a hand in other directors' visual effects. The dance sequence in the bowling alley is better than most musicals I've seen. She directed the Broadway version of The Lion King and while I'm not interested in seeing my favorite cartoon re-imagined, she did win tons of accolades and awards for it. I can definitely see this movie being turned into a Broadway show. But it won't have the magical scope that this film has. It can't.
Even when I could predict how the next scene would play out it still left me with goosebumps. And the very final scene stirred up the tear ducts. I stood in line behind a man in his 60s who asked for a senior discount ticket. You gotta figure this man was a teenager when the Beatles came out. We were the only two in the theatre. If I didn't have to use the men's room so bad, I would have loved to stayed and ask him what he thought of it.

The Freditor