**1/2 (out of ****)
Starring Evan Rachel Wood, Jim Sturgess, Joe Anderson, Dana Fuchs, and Martin Luther McCoy
Directed by Julie Taymor & written by Taymor, Dick Clement, and Ian La Frenais
2007
131 min PG13
Director Julie Taymor (“Frida,” “Titus”) gets an “A” for effort with “Across the Universe,” a Beatles-powered and wildly surreal musical about the 1960s. Yet “Across the Universe” is the story of ciphers: the characters are virtually forbidden from doing anything that hasn’t happened a million times before in a standard ‘60s movie. They go to college, grow out their hair, experiment with sex and drugs, rock hard, protest, become disillusioned, fall in and out of love, and none of the grown-ups understand.
The male lead Jude (Jim Strugess; all the characters are named after Beatles songs) comes closest to being an individual; a dirt-poor Liverpuddlian who goes to sea and jumps ship in America looking for his estranged father is more of an individual than anyone else in the movie. His long hair is terrible, while his best friend and possible unrequited love interest Max (Joe Anderson) grows some sweet layers.
Still, this may be Taymor’s intent, to not some much tell a unique story of unique characters, but to riff musically and visually and the standard ‘60s experience. Yet another strike against the movie is that Taymor’s usually explosive and endless visual invention is here only hit-and-miss. She is rather subdued until the characters start doing drugs; I recall a choreographed football practice but little else from the first third of “Across the Universe.”
Francois Truffaut once remarked that he found genre films easier to make than art films, because the structure was already taken care of for him; his “Shoot the Piano Player” is a blast and is nothing but riffs on film noir. Similarly, Taymor’s greatest accomplishment is still her take-no-prisoners debut “Titus,” in which Shakespeare took care of the structure and freed her to create breathtaking byzantine visuals; “Frida,” in which she must construct a story out of a woman’s whole life, finds her a little adrift, and “Across the Universe” more still.
There are, however, instances of brilliance in “Across the Universe:” the draft sequence, set to “She’s So Heavy,” is stunning. It begins in New York with a poster Uncle Sam coming to life, where clone soldiers with jaws like GI Joe drill underwear-clad recruits in choreographed pushups and medical exams. It ends in a gloriously artificial Vietnam, in which the recruits, still in their tidy whiteys, carry the Statue of Liberty across a model jungle. It’s as great a sequence as anything else this year. The singing throughout is good in a kinda bland Broadway sort of way; U2’s Bono shows up for “I Am the Walrus” to show the kids how it’s done.
*** (out of ****)
Starring Salma Hayek, Alfred Molina, and Edward Norton
Directed by Julie Taymor & written by Clancy Sigal, Diana Lake, Gregory Nava, and Anna Thomas, from the book by Hayden Herrera
2002
123 min R
From a standpoint of plots and performances, “Frida” is a standard biopic, but I’m recommending it for director Julie Taymor’s endlessly inventive visual riffing. You can tell what she really wanted to do is make Frida Kahlo’s paintings come to life, to have Day of the Dead figurines running amok in vibrant Mexican colors, to have naked Frida bleed out her insides in front of us while husband / artist / Marxist Diego Rivera battles biplanes King Kong-style from atop the Empire State Building.
Taymor milks these sequences for all their worth, and renders beautiful the horrific teenage bus crash that left Frida in pain for the rest of her life. Gold dust fills the air as Frida is impaled in slow motion. Taymor is one of the few directors who knows how to use cheesy CGI; the situations she creates are so fantastic, so unreal, that we don’t need the effects to mesh properly with what’s happening.
Yet when it comes to cramming an entire life into a three-act screenplay, Taymor’s results feel hodgepodge, like most biopics. Drama usually needs a villain to represent the internal flaw the hero must overcome. Sometimes action movies can feel unsatisfying because the hero has no flaw and has slain a villain who has nothing to do with him. Biopics feel unsatisfying because the hero’s internal flaw passes through a succession of under-whelming villains (usually including drugs and alcohol). Whom did Ray Charles and Johnny Cash have to overcome? Ray and Cash, mostly.
Go over the AFI Top 100 Movies and notice how many biopics are on it. You got “Amadeus” and “Patton,” but, really, those aren’t biopics. “Amadeus” is Mozart vs. Salieri. “Patton” is Patton vs. the Nazis, covering at most four short years. Drama! In the future, “Ray” and “Walk the Line” will fade into footnotes and Oscar trivia, like “The Buddy Holly Story.” Fine movies all, but hardly groundbreaking, and “Frida” will settle comfortably among them.
Finished Thursday, December 13th, 2007
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