The Principles: Julie Taymor (Director). Evan Rachel Wood. Jim Sturgess. Joe Anderson. T.V. Carpio. I suppose I should also include John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr as writers.
The Premise: Well, on the one hand it’s about a group of friends learning to cope with the world around them (and each other) during the turbulence of the Vietnam War era. On the other hand – it’s about stringing together a bunch of high-concept music videos (with varying degrees of quality) based upon the cast’s covers of a bunch of Beatles songs (again – with varying degrees of quality).
Is It Good: Well, no. It’s not. Taymor took a big bite here and the majority of the time it ended up being more than she could chew. Sometimes it’s a love story. Sometimes it’s a musical. Sometimes it’s a political message movie. Sometimes it’s a concert film. Sometimes it’s trippy jaunt down a metaphorical Abbey Road. It has a hard time being all of those things at once, though. The only thing that it manages to be consistently is a disappointment.
The backbone of the whole film, and perhaps the only motivating factor for any interest in seeing it, is the connection to The Beatles. Well, “connection” is probably an understatement as the entire thing plays like a “Where’s Waldo” book of Beatles references, except that Waldo is every character on every page. To start, every character is named after someone in a Beatles song. We have Sadie, Jude, Lucy, Maxwell, Prudence, JoJo, Dr. Robert, Desmond and Molly, among others. Okay – that’s fine, I suppose, if not a little tedious after awhile. Other references are slightly more graceful (Jude starts the film in a shipyard, working on a yellow vessel of some sort and one of the opening numbers has a few brief moments inside the Cavern Club), but when you have characters dropping song titles as dialogue (in one scene Prudence enters Sadie’s apartment though – you guessed it – the bathroom window, so you can guess what Jude says when Sadie asks “Where did she come from?”) you start to roll your eyes as the novelty wears off.
But that’s a lot of lip service to the least important part. At the forefront is the music – and, like I said earlier – it varies. Some of the covers are actually pretty good, with my personal favorites being Sadie and JoJo’s rendition of “OH! Darling” and the a’capella version of “Because” that the characters sing while at a commune. But for the most part the rest of the songs were rather bland, with only one (Sadie’s “Helter Skelter”) being just truly awful. So, yeah – all in all, it ain’t good.
Is It Worth A Look: Honestly? Yeah, sorta. I mean, don’t bump it up to the top of your queue, but if the opportunity to watch it comes up it’d be worth sitting through it at least once. Taymor may not know how to keep the whole thing on the rails, but sometimes it’s fun to watch how she flies off. She’s definitely not afraid to go all-in visually and conceptually and there is a lot of artistic merit to what she tries to do. After the credits rolled initially I wrote it off wholesale, but the more distance I got from it and the more I thought about it, the more I was able to pick it apart and find little moments that I was able to really appreciate.
Random Anecdotes: Yes I realize that Ringo Starr wasn’t technically a writer for the band, but he WAS credited for “Flying,” which does have a place in the film (he was also credited for “Dig it,” along with the other three Beatles and “Don’t Pass Me By,” his only solo writing credit). Probably my favorite reference was the pairing of the Lucy and Jude characters, which I took to be a nice little nod to the origins of those two songs.
Cinematc Soulmates: Mama Mia!, Tommy, The Wall.
The Tally So Far