Across the Universe doesn’t make it

In theaters Thursday: Jumper, The Spiderwick Chronicles

In theaters Friday: Definitely, Maybe, Step Up 2 The Streets

New on DVD: Gone, Baby, Gone, No Reservations, We Own the Night

We heard rumblings over the weekend that the four-month WGA writers’ strike may be ending very soon — just in time for the Oscars. Head over to CNN for the latest news.

A funny thing happens when characters start singing in a movie, especially already popular songs. The performance may advance the plot and/or reveal what the actor is thinking in the moment, but it doesn’t truly develop character in a way that makes us care for them more because they are expressing a familiar sentiment in an overly familiar way. In fact it can really create a distance between the audience and the actor. This happens several times in Julie Taymor’s visually stunning but otherwise patchy Across the Universe.

The film uses more than 30 Beatles songs as a framework for the story of Jude, a Liverpool dockworker who jumps a ship to the United States looking for the father he never knew. Played by Jim Sturgess, Jude soon meets a silver hammerless Max and his sister Lucy, Evan Rachel Wood, and they shove off on a whirlwind through 1960s subculture. And that’s essentially the plot. Some of the set pieces — in particular the “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)” bit that turns into a Vietnam boot camp from hell — are really well done in an abstract Broadway musical sort of way, but others come off as mundane and, worse yet, forced into the script simply to see how many Beatles songs would fit. As soon as a girl named Prudence turned up, I was counting the minutes until she would lock herself in her room and her friends would have to sing “Won’t you come out to play?” It didn’t take long.

I would have liked it better if Taymor chose lesser-known songs for the film. Maybe she could have set a rule: No singles. That would have been daring and unexpected, and even though the film is generally surreal, it could have used a few more curve balls. Instead it is a little like 1, but with less nuance and more bombast, where most of the humor and fun of the original recordings is replaced almost unilaterally with a consistent, suppressive seriousness. The Beatles weren’t always serious. Much of the time they were ridiculously sarcastic and witty.

Some songs I liked:

“Hold Me Tight.” This was a surprising way to start the action after a somber intro, and it proved completely evocative of early ’60s dance pop. It’s amazing how few people know this upbeat early Beatles song, a hidden gem on With The Beatles.

“I’ve Just Seen a Face.” Paul McCartney’s stab at a Dylanesque love song from Help! is used well here. And the bowling alley sequence it supports avoids any overt seriousness. As John Lennon said describing his love of rock ‘n’ roll: “It’s just good fun.”

“Flying.” The Secret Machines dress up this most obscure of Beatles tracks, a trippy jazz instrumental from the Magical Mystery Tour soundtrack, and they do it well.

Songs they could have done without:

1. Do we really need another version of “Let It Be”? Heard here as a liturgical soundtrack to a New York City funeral and the living dead stalking the jungles of Vietnam, the song sounds tired and trite and borders on the melodramatic. Instead, the equally powerful Abbey Road medley “Golden Slumbers/Carry That Weight” would have been much, much better.

2. I’ve never heard a cover version of “I Am the Walrus” that I like. I don’t think it can be done. So when Bono, looking like Peter Fonda from Easy Rider bursts into the nightclub to steal the stage, he should have been singing the hypnotic “Tomorrow Never Knows” instead.

3. When George Harrison sings “Something,” it is fantastic, golden, untouchable. When Jim Sturgess sings it, well, not so much. Pouring out his heart would have been less burdensome carrying the melody of another Harrison tune, the quiet, gorgeous and little known “Long, Long, Long” from The White Album.

Overall, Across the Universe must be for those who are musical fanatics and casual fans of The Beatles. Because if you are a casual fan of musicals and a Beatle fanatic, you’ll probably be disappointed.