BY ABIGAIL GRABER

In print | Published October 4, 2007

Julie Taymor excels at making horror beautiful and beauty meaningful. Art-house audiences have high expectations for the director whose “Titus” revamped Shakespeare’s slasher-porn into high art and whose “Frida” transformed high art into a powerful story. Though one looks forward to similar feats from “Across the Universe,” a trippy, ’60s musical constructed around Beatles songs, one is tempted to watch it and simply murmur, “Mmmm, pretty.”

So, so pretty. “Across the Universe” is absolutely worth seeing, in a very literal sense. Taymor may have only made two or three films, but she’s clearly watched a whole lot more, especially the work of Baz Lurhmann. Both he and Taymor make films to be seen more than heard; it’s their exquisite pictorial sense that make their work worthwhile. I therefore plan to address “Across the Universe”’s visual magnificence for as long as possible in what will quickly reveal itself to be an increasingly desperate attempt to avoid analyzing the plot.

But first, some background: “Across the Universe” follows young Liverpoolian dockworker Jude (Jim Sturgess, a dead-ringer for Paul McCartney) after he jumps ship in America. Jude hooks up with Max (Joe Anderson), a Princeton dropout who moves with his new pal to New York, where they are joined by Max’s sister Lucy (Evan Rachel Wood). Love blossoms between Jude and Lucy, Uncle Sam calls Max to the front as the Vietnam War revs into gear and the actors sing their way through about 30 Beatles songs with varying degrees of success. (Sturgess and Anderson vocally outshine Wood, though Dana Fuchs trumps all as their bluesy, soul-singing landlady.)

The fact that the visual side of the film surpasses the soundtrack is impressive in itself. Taymor selects each shot with precision, wasting no time on boring composition or pointless movement. The camera is busy, but never disjointed or unfocused. Neither is the exquisitely detailed material that Taymor packs into each frame. “Across the Universe” mixes and matches artistic genres — it seamlessly integrates Broadway sets into industrial office buildings; choreographed dancers share screen time with bizarre puppets and Kabuki masks in inventive, sometimes disturbing, medleys.

The art direction of the film culminates in Max’s examination before the draft board. Set to The Beatles’ “I Want You,” the sequence is a modernist-fascist-cubist-dance extravaganza. With puppets. And if that doesn’t make you want to see the movie, perhaps the description of a troupe of skivvied recruits bearing the Statute of Liberty across a field of miniature palm trees will. Anderson gets his moment in the sun, shining through the bedlam with precise movement and a terrified desperation. It’s fortunate for him that he performs so well here, as the script forgets about him once he ships out. But that’s plot, and we’re ignoring it.

Of course, the music around which the film is constructed holds its own at the center of the visual cornucopia. Taymor clearly intends to universalize “Across the Universe” by covering dozens of Beatles’ songs by way of transgenerational styles — I caught a sprinkling of Pat Benatar, a pinch of Paul Simon, a dash of Janis Joplin and a heaping portion of smoldering-hot-British-guy-singing-with-mournful-soul (pick your artist, pick your generation). You want deeper analysis of the tunes, go ask the music critic — my repertoire is easily exhausted by your average frat party. The point is, “Across the Universe” was conceived to appeal across time, as well as across artistic medium.

Alas, while the artistic side of the film rises magnificently to the challenge, its hollow core undermines its appeal. We have, at last, arrived at the much-dreaded plot analysis.

“Across the Universe” is wont to deal in common tropes of the ‘60s that have long since eroded into cliches. You get your rebellious artists, your radical protestors, your cross-country acid trip in a rainbow-colored bus. When the Muppets have covered your material, it’s time to find more fertile grounds.

Taymor’s aesthetics may simply get the better of her. The film’s ultimate message seems to be that Jude, Lucy and Max are just too pretty to be so afflicted — why, it is criminal of the government to draft a man with such impeccably bleached hair! It’s hard to connect viscerally with people who are so very attractively shaggy, so perfectly boho, so flawlessly un-chic.

And for a film that covers a broad swath of the ‘60s, the main characters are also all jarringly, blindingly white, a problem that is more than merely aesthetic. The few minorities, racial and sexual, are more a part of the film’s colorful palette than its plot.

Perhaps Taymor figures she’s earned her meditation on the plights of the pretty and privileged after “Frida,” which was about a Mexican communist bisexual woman with a unibrow. But “Across the Universe” strikes the wrong tone when it deals cursorily with events like the Detroit race riots and the assassination of MLK. One only has to see the much more agonizing coverage of the latter in this summer’s “Talk to Me” to grasp “Across the Universe”’s shortcomings.

The emotional core finally comes through in Jude and Lucy’s relationship. Taymor is clearly most passionate about this aspect of the film, and one suspects “Across the Universe” could have been stronger overall if she had lent her aesthetic to a pure love story instead of attempting to paint an era. The film’s stated message, after all, is not “You Say You Want a Revolution,” but “All You Need is Love.”

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