For the Benefit of Ms. Taymor
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

Though ‘s a magical mystery tour that discovers new resonances in a catalog of Beatles songs, “Across the Universe” is more often a jumpy, strained mishmash that rises to occasional moments of brilliance.
The songs — about 30 are used in the film — are only the most popular and profitable in the English language, and weighted with a social significance that even their decades of mass popularity have never shaken free. They’ve inspired plenty of good art (Brazil’s tropicalia movement) and bad art (start in Vegas and work your way east to Broadway), and they got film and theater visionary Julie Taymor thinking about a sweeping, yet intimate, musical that could be fashioned from their words and melodies.
Her film, which went through post-production tussles with its distributor, Revolution Studios, imagines a parallel reality in which a mythic 1960s encompasses the coming-of-age story of a group of friends and lovers, each a kind of incarnation of a Beatles tune, or a quasi-surrogate for one of the decade’s pop icons. You sense immediately that when a character is introduced as Jude, someone will be screaming out the ecstatic chorus of “Hey Jude” at him before the credits arrive; or that when a girl named Prudence shows up, climbing in through a bathroom window no less, a situation will arise for the cast to sing “Dear Prudence.” Do you smile or cringe? That’s the problem.
What’s mostly not at issue is the ensemble cast as the film’s archetypes. Ms. Taymor wisely opted to hire actors who could ably sing for themselves, and avoided known Hollywood entities — save for Evan Rachel Wood, and a batch of rock and movie stars (e.g. Bono, Salma Hayek) who appear in cameos. Their lack of familiarity works wonders in terms of creating an emotional context for an otherwise hackneyed storyline.
Jude (Jim Sturgess) is a young Liverpool dockworker who hops on a ship to America. There he befriends Max (Joe Anderson), a soon-to-be Princeton dropout whose foxy yet virginal kid sister Lucy (Ms. Wood) has just lost her G.I. boyfriend in Vietnam. They all end up in a Lower East Side hippie haven overseen by sexy Sadie (a character modeled on Janis Joplin and embodied with turbo-lunged raspiness by Dana Fuchs, a New York blues singer), who finds her match in the Jimi Hendrix-like JoJo (blues guitarist Martin Luther McCoy).
The characters variously pursue their music and art careers amid tightly condensed and choreographed social upheaval. Affable, deadbeat Max has been drafted. Jude is losing Lucy to a raffish student radical. Sadie is being
tempted to sell out by a dubious record executive. And meanwhile, Dr. Robert (Bono, in a cowboy hat, waxing evangelical) is handing out these new things called hallucinogens and inviting everyone to hop onboard a psychedelic school bus.
The 1960s framework is more ably grasped in the flashbacks that a just-okay TV crime procedural like “Cold Case” uses every week. It’s often embarrassing here, as when Bono mimics the famous line “You’re either on the bus or off the bus” at the door of what would be Ken Kesey’s “Furthur,” the bus that conveyed his Merry Pranksters into history.
So it’s best to experience these moments as excuses to get from one song to the next. The project soars when Ms. Taymor busts loose with the movie magic: a phantasmagorical “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite,” featuring Eddie Izzard and puppets inspired by New Hampshire’s Bread and Puppet Theater; an all-too-timely Army induction sequence set to “I Want You,” with an angry Uncle Sam lurching off his recruitment poster; a nasty, funked-up “Come Together,” in which JoJo arrives at the Port Authority and is serenaded by Joe Cocker as a homeless man. It’s refreshing that everyone sings in their own voices (or so it’s presumed), with arrangements that present the songs as something organic rather than pre-fabricated. All the actors aren’t extraordinary vocalists, but their endeavors are the only “real” things in a movie that is never quite far-out enough.
But it’s not for lack of trying. “Across the Universe” induces the mind to wander amid the trippy particulars of production and costume design (by Mark Friedberg and Albert Wolsky, respectively). This is a bonus for New Yorkers, who can indulge in a guessing game about specific locations. Is that really Rivington Street — or a Toronto back lot?