About halfway through "Across the Universe," I began to wonder what I was doing on a Sunday afternoon in 2007 watching a movie featuring Beatles music. I’m 56, grew up on the Beatles, and was about the same age as the film’s main characters as they waded through the strange cavalcade of events that were the late 1960s and early 1970s. While I look at that time with a jaundiced eye, I’m not one of those neo-con cranks who blame all modern ills on sixties' excess. Those years helped make me who I am and I’m kind of fond of my 56-year-old self.
My wonderment of watching a movie with Beatles music is just that. I wonder why the music is still alive and kicking, so full of verve and so relevant. The boys from Liverpool recorded their last album together 37 years ago. Two of them are dead, one from an assassin’s bullet. The surviving two are now in their sixties. Don’t hear much from Ringo. Wouldn’t be hearing much about Paul McCartney if he wasn’t going through a nasty divorce with his young wife. Were the Beatles songs that good? Or were there just so many of us Baby Boomers listening to them?
My daughter Annie is 14. She likes the Beatles and some other bands from that era. She’s kind of a neo-hippie. When I was 14, in 1965, would I have urged my parents to take me to a movie starring a group that had its heyday 37 years before? That would be a crooner from 1928, Rudy Vallee, maybe, or a group that played Charleston dance tunes -- "Flapper" music. There were great jazz musicians, but what did I know of jazz at 14 in Middle America? My father listened to classical music and the rousing tunes of the Scottish Black Watch. My mom liked humming Irish tunes. When I was 11, my father told me not to listen to Elvis or the rest of that rock-and-roll crap I played on my transistor radio. So I absorbed it under the covers at night, Elvis and Dion and Del Shannon and the Shirelles and, eventually, the Beatles and the other bands from the British pop invasion. My very own music, beamed to me via broadcasts from Chicago, Denver, and Wichita.
It may be that the lives of the Beatles so perfectly represented the era. "Across the Universe" begins with young people in the throes of young love. They sing the early songs, which also were about holding hands and love-gone-bad and the pain of long-distance romance. The wild boys from Princeton "get by with a little help from their friends." As the Beatles lives became more serious and complicated – a reflection of their maturity and the times they lived in – so do the songs in the movie. Here comes Vietnam and protests and pot-smoking and hippies and more of Vietnam. At one time, I was afraid the movie would end in a rush of angst and violence, as did the 1960s. But it ends happily – fitting for a musical that has roots in the MGM musical tradition and even the Beatles’ films, "Help" and "Hard Day’s Night." Seems to me a sad or cynical or apocalyptic ending would have gone against the spirit of the band.
Movies in 2007 dwell on the dark side. Not comedies. They tend to dwell on the inane. An unnecessary and unpopular war rages, and we are in the hands of lunatics at home and terrorists abroad. Movies reflect the zeitgeist of the times. "Across the Universe" seems to go against the grain. Maybe we all yearn for some lively song-and-dance. Maybe this Beatles’ immersion in just pure nostalgia for this wrung-out bunch we call Baby Boomers. I’d hate to think it’s only nostalgia. I’d like to think that the Beatles were talented revolutionaries, who helped bring in a wave of great music and good times.
To be continued...
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