Across the Universe is an ode to the sixties, a love story set to the songs of The Beatles. And if the filmmakers had been content to keep the movie at that level then it might have been a success. Unfortunately, they also try to grapple with some of the harsher realities of the period, and end up revealing they haven’t really grasped the sixties’ spirit of rebellion and possibility.

The film ostensibly tells the love story of Jude and Lucy, but its overarching goal seems to be to capture the spirit of the sixties. Jude (Jim Sturgess) comes to America from Liverpool in search of his father, whom he believes is a professor at Princeton but who is really a janitor. He is befriended by Max (Joe Anderson), a rebellious student, and falls for Max’s sister Lucy (Evan Rachel Wood, who’s revelatory), whose boyfriend is a soldier serving in Vietnam. Meanwhile, in a small Ohio town, Prudence (T.V. Carpio) struggles with her lesbianism.

It is in this first act that Across the Universe is most enjoyable and shows the promise of the film that could have been. When Lucy sings “It Won’t Be Long” to express her anticipation at her boyfriend’s return or Prudence sings “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” (here re-arranged as a slow ballad) to her oblivious cheerleader crush, the audience experiences familiar Beatles songs in an entirely new way.

Unfortunately, the film eventually gives way to an overcrowded and unfocused second act. The characters travel to New York, where they live in a boardinghouse run by a Janis Joplin analogue called “Sadie” (Dana Fuchs delivering some of the best song performances in the film). Of course, a Jimi Hendrix look-alike (named “Jojo” and played by Martin Luther McCoy) also shows up. Instead of developing Jude and Lucy’s love story, the movie also has to tell the stories of all these characters. Even worse, the movie’s momentum is killed altogether by a pointless and too-long sequence in which Jude, Lucy and their friends take acid and join “Doctor Robert” (a fictionalized Ken Kesey played by U2 frontman Bono) and his gang in a cross country trip on a bus.

They eventually end up in a circus run by “Mr. Kite” (Eddie Izzard), which is the movie’s most unbearable sequence. Eddie Izzard intones the lyrics to “Being For the Benefit of Mr. Kite”
while director Julie Traynor gets to indulge herself in all sorts of theatrical effects such as puppets and masks in depicting the circus.

This second act is redeemed somewhat by the scene depicting Max’s induction into the Army and his being sent to Vietnam. Traynor pulls out some of her most striking and meaningful visuals in this scene, including a sequence in which new inductees, wearing only towels, are forced to march like automatons. Later on the same group of half-naked recruits drag a replica of the Statue of Liberty through the jungles of Vietnam, a rather pointed jab at the supposedly patriotic motives behind US involvement in the war.

Unfortunately, even as the movie paints a dire picture of the Vietnam war (with implied parallels to the current Iraq war), it also treats the radicalized anti-war movement unsympathetically. In the film Lucy’s increasing involvement with the anti-Vietnam Students for a Democratic Reform (SDR) strains her relationship with Jude and eventually leads to their breakup. The breaking point comes when a jealous Jude confronts the SDR’s leader, whom he believes is moving in on Lucy, with the song “Revolution.” Even in the context of the film this strikes quite a jarring note.

For one, Jude is portrayed in the movie as being apolitical, if not outright apathetic. He’s simply content to live the bohemian life without engaging the growing political and social turmoil around him. So where does his rant about “when you talk about destruction/don’t you know that you can count me out” and “when you want money for people with minds that hate/all I can tell you is brother, you have to wait” come from? Also, the SDR is not shown as turning to violence until later in the movie, after Jude and Lucy have already split and Jude is back in Liverpool.

Lucy does not come out as much better. Although she’s supposed to be radicalized, her participation in the anti-war movement seems shallow, motivated purely by the death of her soldier boyfriend and her brother Max’s current service in Vietnam. Ultimately, it’s implied that her involvement in the movement ends once Max returns home.

Honestly, the movie could have done without this anti-war subplot, or at least handled it with more sensitivity. It seems to paint the radicalization of the anti-war movement, and the violent protests that followed, as signaling the end of everything that was good (i.e. peace and love) in the sixties. It has the feel of something written by two old codgers reminiscing about the “good old days” and wondering why can’t kids today be more like we used to be. (The film’s co-writers, Ian La Frenais and Dick Clement were born in 1937 and both were already 70 when the movie was released in 2007.)

Notably, the last song in the movie proper is “All You Need is Love,” ostensibly sung by Jude to Lucy. But it could also serve as the filmmakers’ closing message to the audience: love is all you need.