Urgently, ungently

[randy_byers]

Last night I watched Across the Universe on DVD. I bawled my eyes out in several places. It felt good. For whatever reason, I needed a good cry.

I have no idea why this movie gets to me the way it does. I mean, I love the Beatles music, so there's that. (Much as my love for Velvet Goldmine is partly my love for Eno and Roxy Music.) But the sensibility at work just really touches some raw nerves for me, some hot spots that I can't claim to understand. Why, for example, do I love Lucy's mother so much? She gets the best line in the Thanksgiving argument scene when she is able to name Kerouac's On the Road, much to Lucy's shock. "I read," Mom explains matter-of-factly. Lucy's conversations with her mom are always full of interesting clashing perspectives, and while Mom comes across as a square, her love and concern for her daughter is always palpable and feels personal. (It's one of the things that made me cry last night.) This film definitely passes the Bechdel Test.

This is the first time I've watched the DVD, and it's not as visually impressive as it was on the big screen. The waves turning into newspaper headlines in the opening credits doesn't seem to work as well as it did when it felt like the waves were going to crash on my head, and some of the color tweaking doesn't look quite right. But the flowing, unfurling development of the story is still there, getting richer and deeper the more I watch it. Not sure how it gets under my defenses, but maybe part of it too is the abiding sense of the impermanence of love. All those Beatles love songs used to express such a variety of attitudes toward and phases of love. "All My Loving" as a brush-off song, with the heard-it-before but still wistful reaction of the girl: "You bastard!" It all builds to the grand all-you-need-is-love reconciliation of Jude and Lucy, but along the way it's a magical mystery tour of every way that love goes wrong and awry.

Update: Oh yeah, forgot to mention that Evan Rachel Wood is starting to look like Ginger Rogers to me. Her face has a similar pert, insouciant look.

Update 2: I also bounced off Dreyer's Vampyr last night for the second time, and I'm setting it aside. It's like a dream, but so far it seems like kind of a boring dream.

Comments

[ron-drummond.livejournal.com]

I think we should be grateful for art that gets under our defenses, as you put it. You sound grateful in your post, but also a little bewildered and not entirely sure you like the way the film gets to you. But anything that gets under our defenses like that is inherently unnerving. Your header is intriguing -- what about the film or the experience was ungentle?

One of the biggest cry-inducing art experiences of my life was my second reading of Engine Summer, and my third reading was strong too. I also find myself crying every time I see Shakespeare in Love. Odd, nothing else is leaping to mind at the moment. But I know that other things have had that effect as well. I'm a softy.

[ron-drummond.livejournal.com]

Oh yeah, another big one was my only reading of Love in the Time of Cholera, back in '88 -- I bawled like a baby throughout the final 60-odd pages of that book, cried my eyes out. It was the phrase "where Mercedes was born" that got me started. Coudn't stop after that.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

Yeah, grateful and bewildered is a good description of my feelings. It's all good. "Urgently, ungently" was something I scrawled in my notebook months ago, and I just stumbled upon it again yesterday. So it's sort of random. However, my crying was urgent and ungentle, so it's also fitting.

[kdotdammit.livejournal.com]

I love that movie more and more everyday. It was playing here on the big screen at the Fox Theater last night and I couldn't go. I was so bummed. I'm going to watch it again on DVD soon. That movie has grown on me like nothing else.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

So it sounds like you have a functioning repertory theater down there. I was just think last night that I'm unlikely to get the chance to see this on the big screen in the near future, unless it plays the Egyptian as a midnight movie.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

I watched the extras and the commentary last night, and Julie Taymor talks about collage quite a bit. Aha!

[ron-drummond.livejournal.com]

Oh yeah, in line with kdotdammit, I should say I really loved Across the Universe the one time I saw it on the big screen. I bought the DVD when it came out, but haven't watched it yet. You two have me seriously thinking I should break it out some evening soon.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I bought the DVD a couple months ago myself. Now I'm thinking I should check out the extras. I wonder if Taymor's commentary is any good.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I was pretty enthusiastic about it in these phosphors a while ago too. And I only ever saw it on DVD, never in the theatre.

I think what works with this movie is not just the use of Beatles songs - high-quality raw material is always a good starting point, but only the starting point - but the way they use them. In two respects:

1) Thoughtful and imaginative musical arrangements and visual choreography. The sheer freshness and cleverness of both in "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" is what most clearly demonstrates that, but it's true of others as well. "I've Just Seen a Face" was never one of my favorite McCartney songs, but it is now.

2) The dynamic plot context into which they're put. You touch on this by mentioning "All My Loving" - not the most interesting musical number in the film, but one with strong impact for this reason. This became clear to me when I revisited the film by watching YouTube clips of some of the best numbers. Yeah, they make good music videos, but they were so much more than that coming up naturally in the course of the story.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

Yes, as I've probably said before, another favorite sequence for me is "Hold Me Tight," which I'm not sure I'd even heard before. The way it cuts back and forth between the sock hop and the Cavern versions of the song is incredibly powerfully, not least in the way that it demonstrates how just this one song can be interpreted in two very different ways. But it also has a narrative purpose in introducing the two future lovers, currently with other girlfriends/boyfriends (so already foreshadowing the theme of the mutability of love), and also showing us the two different class backgrounds of two characters who are going to be changed in the crucible of their times.

Most of the song setpieces work on multiple levels and push the story forward. The one place where things seem to come to a standstill plotwise is the psychedelic roadtrip.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

One thing they talk about in the extras is that they wanted the songs to represent the thoughts of the character(s) singing them, as though they were part of the dialogue. (This may be another difference of the psychedelic sequence, where we get two songs sung as performance, by Dr. Roberts and Mr. Kite.)

They also wanted to completely reimagine the music to give it that freshness you mention. The music producer/arranger talks about dropping famous riffs or figures from the songs to try to make them seem less familiar. (As he says, we all tend to supply the well-known riffs automatically in our heads anyway.)