Starring: Evan Rachel Wood, Jim Sturgess, Joe Anderson
Director: Julie Taymor
Category: IIA
Set in the 1960s and billed as both a tribute to the Beatles' songs and the tumultuous period in which they emerged, Julie Taymor's Across the Universe ends with All You Need is Love. It's not used in the context in which it was written, however: far from being a paean to pacifist ideals, it's the call of lovelorn Jude (Jim Sturgess) as he despairs over the possibility of losing Lucy (Evan Rachel Wood).
The way the song is re-imagined as a mere romantic ditty, with boy-wants-girl sentimentality crowding out the original anti-war message, sums up the place of history and politics in Across the Universe. Archive images and restaged sequences that replay events defining the US in the 1960s - the Detroit riots, the Vietnam war, the civil rights movement and Martin Luther King's death - are just backdrops to the on-off love story of Jude, a Liverpudlian docker jumping ship to a new life in America, and Lucy, a rural schoolgirl radicalised after joining her Princeton-educated, wannabe-bohemian brother Max (Joe Anderson) in New York.
As is apparent from the names of the two young lovers, Beatles references are the key to Across the Universe: Max sings Hey Jude to encourage Jude to patch things up with his sister; the boys' sexually charged, rock-singer landlord (Dana Fuchs) is named Sadie; and her band's label bears the name of a fruit, albeit a strawberry rather than an apple. These are all clever devices to keep initiated audiences busy, but such postmodern knowingness only reflects the vacuity of the proceedings.