Occasionally, I'll give my creative writing students an exercise that goes something like this: take a candelabra, a piece of fishing wire, a map, a casual lie that can't be taken back, and come up with a story. It must contain all of these elements, but beyond that the world of fiction is open to you. Now, just let yourself write. . . .
The 3 people (Dick Clement, Ian La Frenais, and Julie Taymor [1]) who worked on the screenplay for Across the Universe [2] seemed to be operating on a similar paradigm. Take all the Beatles songs you can think of, match them up with random historical events from the 60's and 70's, and create a story based on the characters and situations therein. Ready, set, go!
The result is a herky-jerky peace-love-and-war narrative that plays like Forrest Gump [3] (another weak, insipid film, in my opinion) on acid. As in Gump, there's a slender, blonde heroine with woeful eyes, a rather dense love interest, a best friend who goes to war and comes back changed. A stoic mother, a mysterious father figure, the list goes on and on. . . .All this film is missing is the footage of John Kennedy, a character with AIDS, and Buffalo Springfield's "For What It's Worth," which is a sad omission indeed.
Across the Universe follows -- and I use that term loosely -- the life of the bastard Liverpudlian Jude in his quest to find his American father. He meets up with Max (who does, in fact, wield a hammer, though it's not silver), Sadie (sexy as all get-out), and Lucy, that doe-eyed heroine who does, by the end of the film, actually appear from out of the sky. The whole lot lives together in a walk-up in Hell's Kitchen, hopping from one bed to another, experiencing the turbulent 60's, visiting smoky bars and relying for spiritual sustenance on rock-and-roll. They ride a psychedelic bus and debate the war and hurt one another on the road to finding true love. Sound familiar?
It is. And it's probably not a bad story, even if it has been told 3,000 times. But what's missing in this film is good old-fashioned plotting: rather than allowing events to lead from one to the next -- giving the impression of an organic and inevitable outcome -- everything in this film is gerrymandered to fit the music. The screenplay reeks of writers who wandered around thinking, "Oooohhh, the race riots in Detroit, I can link those to Let It Be." and "Strawberry Fields. . . .whoa that's deep." Those song lyrics that don't lend themselves to an easy narrative device, such as the strawberries, simply get wedged in: Jude, the artist, staring at a bowl of fruit; Jude going into a frenzy and pinning strawberries to the wall; Jude struck by inspiration as he watches the strawberry juice bleed. Uh, yeah.
There are some incredibly watchable scenes in this movie. You'd have to have a heart -- and ears -- of stone not to be overjoyed when Joe Cocker [6] appears on screen, dressed as a beggar, a prophet, and a pimp, to belt out Come Together. But in the gestalt, this is a well-intentioned mess of a movie that uses a flimsy narrative device rather than simply telling a story. As a teacher, I'd give this effort a C+. And that's if it was executed by my sophomore students at Macalester.
My advice? For the best, most startling wartime tales, check out Tim O'Brien [7]'s The Things They Carried [8]. For a heartbreaking and beautiful tribute to the Beatles, read the Modern Love [9] written by novelist Ann Hood [10] on the event of her daughter's death. And if you want to see a couple landmark films about re-entry after Nam, watch Coming Home [11] and The Big Lebowski [12]. In that order.
Across the Universe is showing on two screens at the Edina Cinema [13].