“All You Need Is Love” Across the Universe: Julie Taymor & The Beatles By Jen Johans |
| Essentially, the film can be best surmised as a classic love story between the worldlier, blue collar working class British Jude (Sturgess) and the beautiful, smart, young, compassionate upper class American idealist Lucy (Wood) whose innocence is yet another casualty of the tumultuous era when she loses her first serious boyfriend in Vietnam. While an overview is especially beneficial in a film of this epic scale, since I’ll be walking through the plot throughout, I wanted to go with an excerpt of Stephen Holden’s summary from The New York Times:
father, meets Lucy through her brother, Max (Joe Anderson), a student at Princeton, where the father is discovered working as a janitor."
Max shocks his parents by announcing that he is dropping out of college. He and Jude drive to New York and settle in a sprawling East Village tenement and are soon joined by Lucy. “Their landlady, Sadie… is the movie’s resident earth mother. An aspiring rock singer, she sounds like a warmer, more controlled Joplin. Her triumphal “Why Don’t We Do It in the Road?” announces Lucy’s arrival in New York…. “Rounding out the bohemian household are Jo-Jo (Martin Luther McCoy), a guitarist who arrives from Detroit by Greyhound after his younger brother’s death in the Detroit riots, and Prudence (T.V. Carpio), an Asian-American lesbian cheerleader who hitchhikes to New York from Dayton, Ohio…" “Jo-Jo, who suggests a softened Jimi Hendrix, becomes Sadie’s on-again-off- again boyfriend and sometime lead guitarist. …” Then as Roger Ebert best sums it up, “they all go through a hippie period on Dr. Robert's Magic Bus, where the doctor (Bono) and his bus bear a striking resemblance to Ken Kesey's magical mystery tour. They also get guidance from Mr. Kite (Eddie Izzard).” However, later, ultimately, “While Jude embraces art, Lucy, who lost her first boyfriend in Vietnam, gravitates toward antiwar activism after Max receives his draft notice and reluctantly leaves to fight in the war,” (Holden). To create Universe, Taymor and her co-writers Ian La Frenais and Dick Clement selected thirty-three of the two hundred plus songs from the Beatles catalogue to construct not only a love story but one that chronicled the various movements of the 1960’s and the way they affected all groups from the hippies to the militants, Vietnam war veterans to British immigrants and gender double standards as well as the lives of minorities (whether African-American or Asian). As she shared in the DVD featurette “Creating the Universe,” in asking how that specific period speaks to us now as a global society post 9/11, Taymor decided she wanted to avoid the trappings of a “history musical” and, while working in the events of the decade and their influence on society, aim for an old-fashioned feel first and foremost since the Beatles songs express such strong emotions. In doing so, she fought against inserting it with overt political statements or negativity but preferred to create a cinematic “social statement,” hoping to inspire today’s youth by the passion of the youth from the 60’s by showing echoes of how that decade reflected issues we’re still facing today (DVD). According to an interview with Taymor from ComingSoon.net, Across the Universe was originally titled All You Need Is Love, but it was changed by Taymor not just for fear that in cynically contemporary society that “very deep statement” would be considered “a very trite statement,” but also because she stated her belief that, “you have to experience the dark side and go through all of the experience of those characters before you can say the words, ‘All You Need is Love. Across the Universe… is much more appropriate because also this movie needs to speak to everybody in the world and the Beatles belonged to everybody in the world.” After the film begins with Jude’s melancholically beautiful recollection on a British sandy beach, we flash back years earlier to the origins of the story which find Jude in a gritty UK club modeled after the Cavern Club where the Beatles performed in the early 60’s (IMDb) as he dances with his girlfriend just before venturing to the states to find his biological father. While the British characters dance into the wee small hours of a raucous morning, simultaneously Taymor cuts the action to a decidedly different view of young love as Lucy and her boyfriend Daniel, dance with others dressed to the nines at their high school prom, just before Daniel (echoing Jude) is getting ready to ship off for Vietnam. Typical for the time, the men ready themselves for adventure while the women stay home, yet it’s a lively introduction that not only sets the fast pace of the two hour plus film but also gets us accustomed to Taymor’s bold decision to have female characters singing the formerly male lyrics. Taymor explained her reasoning to ComingSoon.net by noting that The “Beatles at that time were channeling fifteen- year-old girls. That’s why the girls were going nuts, because they sang their feelings.” In 1984, while questioned in The Lost Beatles Interviews, poet Allen Ginsberg saw it another way:
complete masculinity allied with complete tenderness and vulnerability. And when that note was accepted in America, it did more than anything or anyone to prepare us for some kind of open-minded, open-hearted relationship with each other and the rest of the world.” (371) Given Ginsberg’s homosexual orientation and his last statement, it makes the perfect lead in for the next outstanding clip (following the photo), again featuring a female vocalist but as opposed to Wood’s upbeat “Hold Me Tight,” this time, we’re fully aware of the gender switch when the action moves to Ohio. There in a bravura, heartbreaking performance, we first encounter T.V. Carpio’s sad outcast Prudence as she looks longingly at a beautiful cheerleader, singing “I Wanna Hold Your Hand,” to the female object for whom she’s afraid to have affection. As Ebert noted, “When Prudence sings 'I Want to Hold Your Hand,' for example, I realized how wrong I was to ever think that was a happy song. It's not happy if it's a hand you are never, never, never going to hold. The love that dare not express its name turns in sadness to song.” And indeed, quickly afterwards, she realizes that as an Asian-American lesbian in the 60’s, the Midwest is possibly the last place she should live, soon hitching a ride for New York. |
| Left to Right: Max, Jude, & Prudence. |
| Left to Right: Jude & Lucy. |
Prudence |
| Left to Right: Jo-Jo & Sadie. |
| Left to Right: Lucy & Daniel. |
| Text Only (c) Jen Johans. filmintuition.com |
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| Note: When originally posted in 2008, the embedded videos we found online were all in working order. However, due to Sony Pictures copyright violation, a majority of the clips have now been removed from YouTube. We've chosen to leave all of the original videos throughout the piece to give you a reference point of where to follow along when you watch the film on your own to best appreciate the essay. |
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