Across the Universe (2007)

Julie Taymor's Across the Universe arrived in 2007 with a budget of seventy million dollars and a conceit that could charitably be called audacious: thirty-three Beatles songs stitched into a romantic drama about the 1960s. The result is a jukebox musical that treats the decade as a series of tableaux, Vietnam, Columbia, Detroit, each lit gorgeously and each lasting about as long as a chorus. Evan Rachel Wood and Jim Sturgess fall in love against this backdrop, and the film is far more interested in how that looks than in what it means.

The casting has a deliberate arithmetic to it. Jo-Jo, Sadie, and Prudence are foregrounded as leads, a multiracial bohemian circle assembled to mirror the Village of the era. Prudence's longing for a female cheerleader is staged with a soft melancholy in the Dear Prudence sequence, a thread that exists honestly but does not carry the film. Sadie's ambitions and Lucy's activism give the women agency, though the movie is a psychedelic romance first and a statement second. Race enters through the 1967 Detroit riot and the death of a young boy, and the gospel staging of Let It Be makes the grief explicit. Commerce takes a few knocks when the record industry chews up Sadie, but the critique stays local.

Much of the progressive furniture an audience might expect is simply not in the room. There is no environmental argument, no body-positive messaging, no neurodivergent thread, and no rewriting of the historical record, only real events used as scenery. The anti-war sentiment is sung and staged, which keeps the sermonizing to a low hum. It is a sincere, overstuffed curiosity, and it means every word it sings.