Designing Women: Julie Taymor's Across the Universe (Long)

I don’t know how the process works—whether female directors tend towards a certain kind of character-driven relationship-centered drama or whether the gatekeepers filter out everything but this. Few females have been authorized to direct action (Kathryn Bigelow, partially because of her marriage to James Cameron, and Karyn Kusama (Aeon Flux) ) and no one ever seems to cross over into design-heavy science fiction or period films (have not seen Marie Antoinette). I think studio heads still get nervous when too much cash is on the line with a female director at the controls. It would be interesting to see what the largest-budgeted film helmed by a woman is. My guess is Kathryn Bigelow’s Strange Days, but that is just a guess. It seems that women are allowed to direct television and indy-cred relationship movies, but large canvas epics are strictly off limits. No costume dramas, no big set pieces, no toys. Certainly no war movies. Just emotions.



Julie Taymor, on the other hand, seems to be working outside of this confinement. Character is definitely a distant second (or third, or fourth) to her spectacular design in her new film Across the Universe, which plays like 20 spectacularly trippy music videos mashed end to end.

Taymor and her co-writers have strung together two dozen or so Beatles songs into a semi-coherent narrative about a chap from Liverpool (Jude) who comes to New York City as the 60s explode into chaos. There are characters named Maxwell, Lucy, Prudence, etc. You get the idea. But because the narrative is drawn from the original songs and not the other way around, like other musicals, it feels false and contrived. It’s an excuse to go out and cram a bunch of clever musical set-pieces into a not-so-believable story.



But spectacular music video sequences do not a good movie make. I recognized that same worn-down feeling I get after watching 2+ hours of MTV at home (in the late 90s of course, we all know MTV plays no videos these days). Some visionary sequences, some not-so-visionary… but mainly it’s that ongoing rush of plotlessness and lack of character arc that gets to you… not unlike watching two hours of commercials.



The film takes a Forrest Gump view of history, as well, touching on the main events that define the 60s for filmmakers (Detroit riots, Kent State, MLKs assassination, Vietnam, etc. etc). There is a Janice Joplinesque character and a Jimi Hendrix character and references to Timothy Leary and Ken Kesey’s magic bus. But it doesn’t feel emotionally honest—like, at all. You can dress up Vietnam and Kent State with arty, MTV visuals and editing but it doesn’t capture anything honest. It’s history being used as a logo to sell something, and it’s actually kind of offensive. I wondered what a Vietnam Vet would think of the way the war is treated in this film… As a bunch of startling, beautiful/horrific surreal images to drive a rock-n-roll music video forward. But the kids of today who are watching this won’t realize that it’s just wallpaper, of course. For them, these visuals contribute to their (mis)understanding of the period. Indeed, the further we get away from the 60s, the more it seems they are hardening into these 10 or so images/stories that stereotype the decade. Taymor was 14 during the Summer of Love, but for some reason the material feels like it was created by someone born in the 70s. Or 80s.



Across the Universe achieves the strange duality of being both visionary and uninteresting at the same time. That said, I love that this film was made. I am always clamoring for something new, and this was definitely something new. I can imagine all of the meetings and planning and convincing that Taymor had to do to get the money to do this film. And I love the playful challenge of it all. There’s no real precedent to this thing (Moulin Rouge, maybe, comes close) so there was probably a very real sense of “I don’t know how this is going to turn out but lets try our best”. That sense of risk is absent from most things these days, especially in film, so it’s important to commend this true artistic spirit when it shows itself, even if it’s in the form of a semi-failure like Across the Universe. And the film is divisive—the reviews are all over the board on this one—which is always a good sign.



I would have adored this film in high school/early college. It’s a good film for film students—a painfully self-aware, stunningly visual tour de force…And Bono as Neal Cassady is a masterstroke. The older I get, though, the less I want cleverness and the more I just want character-driven films that move me, whatever the gender of the filmmakers.