Weekly meditations from your humble messenger
Back
on the Long and Winding Road
(Across the Universe, 10/22/07)
By Nicholas Nicastro
From
a certain angle, the world needs another Beatles-inspired musical like
it needs a third Bush Presidential term. I mean, there are those of
us who adore the tunes, but don't see the need for a Cirque du Soleil
Beatles show, or to have "breakfast with the Beatles" every
week, week in and week out. Can't buy me love, sure, but can money please
buy me brunch with the Who now and then? Or mimosas with the Stones?
Admittedly, those of us who see
it this way don't visualize things from Julie Taymor's angle. Taymor,
the Tony-winning director of the Broadway musical version of The
Lion King, and the eye behind the vivid Titus (1999) and
Frida (2002), is steadily becoming the 21st century standard-bearer
of Ken Russell-like visionary excess. Her Valentine to the Beatles and
the 1960's, Across the Universe, is perhaps her most ambitious
project yet. Here she attempts not just to illustrate a great
story, as she did the Shakespeare play or the life of Frida Kahlo, but
to make pictures and music carry the weight by themselves.
The result is, in no particular
order, grand, meandering, superficial, and stunning. Taymor's grotesque
Busby Berkeley aesthetic, with its pastiche production numbers from
hell, produces consistent surprises, such as bombers dropping exploding
strawberries on Vietnam, or G.I.s bearing an enormous Statue of Liberty
across the smoking jungle. She populates her landscape with a cast of
'60's "types"—a Liverpudlian McCartney-type (Jim Sturgess),
a Janis Joplin-type (Dana Fuchs), a Jimmie Hendrix-type (Martin Luther
McCoy)—who play out our collective myth of what it was like to
live through the Sixties. In this, Taymor seems to suggest that if Hendrix
and Joplin didn't get in on in reality, they might as well should have.
The characters, meanwhile, all get Beatle-esque names like "Prudence,"
"Sadie," and "Jude." (Mr. Mustard and Eleanor Rigby,
alas, go AWOL.) It all sounds fairly dubious, sort of like Hair
without the original tunes. But to a surprising extent, as long as the
conceit gets us to the next exploding strawberry, we're entertained.
Not that we should expect anything
like accuracy or coherence from the spectacle. Though this is a Beatles
Universe (you just live in it, friend), we get no John Lennon-type,
and scant Harrison-esque Eastern mysticism. U2's Bono shows up as a
singing Timothy Leary, but somehow forgets to mention drugs. Free love
gets lost in translation, too. As in Hair, it wants to insist
that everybody who served in Vietnam came back either dead or wounded,
when the reality is that the vast majority did not. In short, if you
want to understand the Sixties, instead of just grooving to it, read
a book. Better yet, talk to somebody who lived through them.
Sturgess and American Everygirl
Evan Rachel Wood are not exactly accomplished in their singing, but
their hesitant warblings seem to have the virtue of innocence. At its
best, Universe makes the old songs sound fresh again. At its
worst, it reduces them to cultural cud, coughing them up whether they're
relevant or not. Midway through the feast, it occurred to me that maybe—just
maybe—somebody else in the 60's wrote a song that might go better
with a Detroit race riot, or the lovelorn travails of a gay Iowa cheerleader.
So will we ever get to have Breakfast with the Kinks instead of the
Fab Four? Tomorrow never knows.
©2007 Nicholas Nicastro
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