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Other reviews by Howard Schumann
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BEATLEMANIA
Unfortunately Taymor dumbs down the power of the songs to capture our imagination by providing too literal readings, naming the characters Lucy, Prudence, Max, and Jude and tying them to specific plot points. For example, Prudence enters “through the bathroom window” and provides a lesbian reading of the song “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” Max has a sequence with a hammer and “Strawberry Fields Forever” becomes a music video in which falling strawberry bombs explode on bleeding strawberry bodies.
While the film gets most of the history right, there is some confusion in linking the counter-culture street people with the student protests, two distinct elements that were mostly at odds with each other throughout the period. Nonetheless, for fans of The Beatles and for a new generation that is eager to learn about the nature of their appeal, Across the Universe is a moving and at times transcendent ride. Joyous and passionate, the film has buckets full of heart and a vibrant energy that invites us to viscerally experience a time when people believed in something larger than themselves and were willing to put their bodies on the line in its support.
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Across
the Universe offers a new generation an experience
of the vitality and sheer exuberance of the Beatles' musical
portfolio. Julie Taymor’s flawed but ambitious salute
to Beatlemania is a musical celebration of thirty-three of
the Beatles' most famous songs and how they reflected the
idealism of the sixties. Utilizing her background in puppetry,
folklore, mythology, and mime, Taymor brings imagination and
creativity to the table with some silly but mostly wonderful
results. The film not only integrates the Beatles songs into
a heartfelt love story, it also provides a mirror into the
political and social turmoil of the decade.
While
clips are shown about the fighting and dying in Vietnam, the
assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, and the racial turmoil
in our inner cities, the film primarily offers a heart warming
picture of young idealists fighting a corrupt system. You
will not find any mention here of drug overdoses, children
begging in the street for spare change, or clinics and hospitals
clogged with young people carrying sexually transmitted diseases.
The songs are the stars and the fact that they are sung by
the cast themselves rather than being lip-synched adds immediacy
to the experience. 
The
story itself is thin but appealing. Jude (Jim Sturgess), a
dockworker in Britain is enticed by friend Max Carrigan (Joe
Anderson) who has dropped out of college to go with him to
New York. Deserted by his American father (Robert Chohessy)
prior to his birth, he is eager to meet the father he never
saw, now working at Princeton University as a janitor. Jude
and Max move into a Greenwich Village apartment and meet their
landlady Sadie (Dana Fuchs), a night club singer who is reminiscent
of Janis Joplin, JoJo (Martin Luther McCoy) who plays guitar
in the mode of Jimi Hendrix, and Prudence (T.V. Carpio). 
Cameos
are also performed by Bono as a Ken Kesey look-alike and Joe
Cocker as a street person who sings “Come Together.”
Soon Jude falls for Max’s sister Lucy (Evan Rachel Wood)
whose boyfriend (Spencer Liff) was killed in Vietnam. While
he pursues a career as a graphic artist, her interests lean
toward political activism and the values of the two clash
on more than one occasion. As Max is drafted and sent to Vietnam,
the film touches upon key events of the sixties. One of the
most touching is a sequence in Detroit during the racial unrest
as a Gospel choir sings the beautiful “Let it Be”
to mourn the death of a youngster in the riots. One of the
best choreographed sequences takes place at a draft center
when figures emerge from an Uncle Sam poster singing “I
Want You” and menacing looking masked soldiers process
the stripped-down inductees in a military formation.