[rating=3]

They lay there for days, waiting for someone to untangle their hair...

Trippy but Hollow…

Now this isn’t a conventional film by any standards. The always-inventive director Julie Taymor (“Titus”, the underrated “Frida”) gives the finger to straightforward narrative and character development, and focuses instead on magnifying her hallucinatory visions, in tune to the Beatles soundtrack. The result is a series of beautiful sketches, pretty to look at… but impossible to relate to.

This is not a biography of the Beatles, for those naive enough to expect that. Nor is it a musical exploration of the changing 1960s. “Across the Universe” does take place in that decade, but never approaches anything close to making any sort of a statement. The best way to define the film would be: it’s Julie Taymor’s allegorical glance at the 1960s, through Beatles glasses.

Lucy (Evan Rachel Wood) and Jude (Jim Sturgess) fall in love. Then Lucy’s brother Max (Joe Anderson) gets shipped off to Vietnam. That’s basically the rough premise of the film.

The Beatles always had one foot planted firmly on the druggy side, what with all the Yellow Submarine trippiness and their otherworldly (for the time) vibes. Taymor exploits that side of the Beatles, not in a grungy Oliver Stone’s “Doors” sort of way, but in a lyrical, personal one.

The film’s alignment of music and images is hit-and-miss though, depending on your interpretation of the songs, and as means of supporting the already feeble thread of a plot-line it fails quite miserably. The film never stirrs, not as a love story, and not as an anti-war film. The images vary so much in color intensity and mood, that watching “Across the Universe” is like being inside a kaleidoscope and not knowing on which acidic shade to focus.

The actors do a good job singing and conveying the emotion of each tune, and yet – though the lack of character development is intentional – at times the film cries out for at least a shade of genuine human feeling, and not a stylized interpretation of one. Julie Taymor does an excellent job conveying her personal hallucinatory perspective of the Beatles, and it’s fascinating to the eye, but she falls quite short on exploring the timelessness of either their music or their time, and that’s a disappointment to the heart.