Across The Universe

****

In my mind, musicals like Moulin Rouge, First Night and Once are Nuevo Musicals. This fairly new thing of mixing pop music with narrative story telling is not really the creation of a musical, in the order of the recently released Sweeny Todd, but still, these films are musical in their intent. If you like Nuevo Musicals, the Beatles, and didn’t flat line during the ’60’s then director Julie Taymor’s (Frida, Broadway’s The Lion King) “Across The Universe” will leave you flying high.

The film opens with some of the early Beatles tunes paying homage to what I believe is the best of the Fab Four. One scene here is even shot in the old Cavern Club, famous as the Liverpool home stage to the group. From that point it’s your regular boy-meets-girl story taking a quick turn when we meet Prudence, a sexy high-school cheerleader whose lesbian desires are revealed during her rendition of I Wanna Hold Your Hand. Throughout the story the primary characters are either named after a Beatles song: Lucy (Even Rachael Wood) Lucy In The Sky, Jude (Jim Sturgess) Hey Jude, Sadie (Dana Fuchs) Sexy Sadie and Jo-Jo (Martin Luther McCoy), or they represent an historical character or composite of characters from that period.

The narrative portion of the story is fairly remedial, but what is one supposed to do in the daunting face of dealing with music from the greatest band of all time and some of the best music ever written. Taymor does what she does best. Rather than spending a lot of needless time trying to out write or out maneuver the music she gets creative where she’s the best and that’s the musical numbers. There is some awesome talent with this young cast and Taymor finds a way to use everyone’s talent in the musical numbers that run from simple to the psychedelic absurd.

Along with the superb cast is a portfolio of cameos that includes Salma Hayek as five different nurses (as if one wouldn’t be enough), Bono as Dr. Roberts, Joe Cocker in three different roles and Eddie Izzard as Mr. Kite. Nuevo Musical or not, he respectful manner which Taymor and the cast perform this endearing music makes you want to search out your old peace sign necklace put it on and flip a few peace signs. Peace.