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.