Across The Universe

If you chop Julie Taymor's Beatles-inspired musical into its 33 individual tracks, you would have a treasure trove of superbly psychedelic mini-music videos. But as a story-oriented whole, Across the Universe is more feeble than funky.

Universe struggles to forge a plot out of its pre-destined soundtrack. Jude of "Hey Jude" and Lucy of "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds" fall conveniently into love during the Vietnam War and those strawberries of "Strawberry Fields Forever" make a satisfactorily squishy appearance as the object of Jude's artistic desperation. Not so bad, right?

But then Taymor arbitrarily introduces Prudence of "Dear Prudence", an entirely irrelevant lesbian Asian girl who sulks and sways and has nothing to do with anything and eventually disappears into a traveling circus presided over by Mr. Kite aka Eddie Izzard and his host of long-faced blue puppets.

With the sparseness of original dialogue, the actors are forced to depend on the film's music as a crutch. Still, boyishly handsome Brit Jim Sturgess carries the role of Jude with a noticeable ease, falling into song and choreography with a jaunty charm- his opening ballad is worthy of a swoon. Evan Rachel Wood is a delicate activist-nymph who strikes up a dreamy chemistry with Sturgess. Guest star Bono makes a neon appearance during a trippy spin through the countryside (goo goo g'joob!) and Dana Fuchs and Martin Luther McCoy storm the stage as sexy soulful band/bed mates Sadie and JoJo.

Universe is pleasant enough-how could it not be with the Beatles as a creative muse? Taymor infuses the film with that dizzifying hippy make-love-not-war sensibility that we need a little more of these days.

The inventory of beautifully outlandish scene snippets, although nonsensical, make for an agreeable visual spectacle. But the film stumbles in its journey for the truly spectacular by lapsing into the literal or diving too venturously into its lyrical script. The dose of psychotropics lose their edge and even singing a sad song won't make it much better.