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Across the Universe

Directed by Julie Taymor

Written by Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais

Starring Evan Rachel Wood, Jim Sturgess, Joe Anderson, Dana Fuchs

Classification: 14A

Rating: ***1/2

This much is inarguable: In the more than two flamboyant hours of Across the Universe, Julie Taymor doesn't cheat us for a single second. Drawing upon every visual resource in her rich directorial palette — after all, she knows film ( Titus, Frida), she knows opera ( The Magic Flute), she knows theatre ( The Lion King), and she sure knows giant puppets — Taymor paints the screen with such panache, such joyful verve, that even when it's bad it's still awfully good. The eye is delighted and, since the whole spectacle is powered by 33 classic Beatles songs, the ear does pretty well too. The result is a movie musical like none before.

Yes, this is tour de force stuff, and yet, just like a good pop tune, the premise is all boy-meets-girl simplicity. Jude the Liverpool lad (Jim Sturgess) falls for Lucy the American lass (Evan Rachel Wood). He quits the grey shipyards to cross the pond, she leaves a privileged family to find herself, and, amid the hubbub of New York City, their love affair plays out against the social/sexual/political swirl of the sixties. The full range of that swirl is set straight from the opening frames when, in tender close-up on an English beach, a heart-struck kid sings the plaintive strains of Girl while, a continent away, all Helter Skelter breaks loose. The sequence morphs from winsome to frenzied without missing a beat — already, the canvas is stretched broadly and Taymor's brush is poised.

It's not long before she makes an indelible impression. In a few deft strokes, the period politics emerge: A blond son of Uncle Sam gets packed off to the quagmire of Vietnam; an innocent child of the ghetto awaits the conflagration in Detroit. Inevitably, they meet the same fate, whereupon Taymor cuts with electrifying effect between scenes of intertwined grief — dual funerals with colour-blind mourners weeping to a potent gospel arrangement of Let It Be. The tragedy sparks the music even as the music deepens the tragedy, and the impact feels bone-deep.

But don't get down. The movie's sense of sheer fun, both ingenuous and mocking, is just as palpable. As our lovers arrive in New York, so do the supporting characters — Sexy Sadie the lovely songstress (Dana Fuchs); her paramour JoJo, the Hendrix wannabe (Martin Luther McCoy); dear Prudence the lonely waif (T.V. Carpio); and Lucy's soon-to-be-drafted brother Max (British actor Joe Anderson with a distractingly quacky American accent). Now check out Max's call-up to the military — it's Taymor's cue to choreograph a veritable army of robotic sergeants wailing I Want You, punctuated by the new recruits literally toting the Statue of Liberty to the song's suddenly ironic chorus, She's So Heavy. Oh, the burden of spreading democracy through the whole wide world.

So you can see, and hear, how the plot is embedded directly into the Lennon-McCartney lyrics, which obviously have their own impressive range. One moment, Lucy is pondering the first pangs of romance in If I Fell, and if Wood's voice is a little thin, no matter — any carping dissipates when her cover melds so sweetly with the context. The next moment, Sadie and JoJo are having a domestic spat, and the argument gets blasted out on an night-club stage as a competing duet to Oh Darling, where the rawness of the words are not only exposed but given a darker edge. Again, the narrative structure allows the performers to do what a Beatles cover, what any cover, should do — reinterpret the song.

Similarly, when the story takes a complicating turn — juicy Lucy becomes radicalized while cool Jude draws pictures in his garret — the ensuing politics-versus-art conflict also finds a ready-made home in the Beatles canon (and, for that matter, in the Beatles own history). Watch for a rousing tableau where Jude strides right into the political lion's den to confront a placard-waving Lucy with a furious version of Revolution: "But if you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao/ You ain't gonna make it with anyone anyhow."

En route,`, Taymor reaches back to the era and finds her inspiration in places pop and not — in iconic newspaper photos, in period album covers, in Lennon's pencil sketches, in Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters crowd (an excuse for a rollicking cameo by Bono belting out — what else? — I Am the Walrus). Admittedly, there are times when Taymor runs riot herself, when the cornucopia of sights teeming onto the screen can seem torturous, even risible, as if we tumbled into some stranger's acid flashback. Call me unimaginative, but my take on Strawberry Fields falls a tad short of exploding fruit in the East Village transforming into battleground blood in Southeast Asia. But, at my sober-sided age, maybe a borrowed trip is better than no trip at all, and, anyway, you know, nothing is real and nothing to get hung about.

The worst, then, is forgivable, while the best pulses in two-part harmony with the best of the Beatles — so simple and so complex in the same tuneful breath. That's why the finale of the movie, which deliberately echoes the final performance of the Fab Four themselves, seems entirely earned to me. There, high on a rooftop above a busy street, a band makes music that drifts down to smiling passersby. There, too, a band dissolves, leaving a lone figure, palely loitering, to seize the neglected mike and, a cappella, reminds us again that All You Need Is Love — the tireless anthem that, now and then, in fiction and in fact, defies and demands our true belief.