I really must get out more.
But then, I discovered Evan Rachel Wood! I have seen glimpses of her, acting in various movies and TV series, and though she came across as a singularly sweet and simple person, I did not watch these things for long enough for the actress to make an impression on me.
When I finished watching this movie, I was head-over-heels in love with Evan Rachel Wood. And more: she can sing! (Yes, I just discovered that she sings in Frozen 2, where she voices the mother of Anna and Elsa.) I don't know whether it’s brilliant acting, or whether this is just Evan Rachel Wood being herself, but that simplicity, sweetness and earnestness is the essence of the character she plays: Lucy Carrigan.
The story is, essentially, that a Liverpool child of a single mother signs up for the British Army, and then skips out when the boat docks in New York. He meets a mischievous undergraduate at a certain college, makes friends, and is invited to his home for Thanksgiving. There he falls in love with the sister of his friend, played by Evan. In my opinion, Matt and Lucy Carrigan are the most believable characters in the movie, and Lucy [Evan] far more convincing than Matt. In a sense, this movie, though it isn’t very convincing as a movie on its own terms, does a good job of representing various archetypes of the young people of that time. Evan does a fantastic job of playing the young woman who feels impelled to protest police brutality of that time, and the war in Vietnam, which was emerging as unjustified, and unwinnable.
The peculiar thing about the movie is that the characters were required to sing a series of Beatles songs that seemed to superficially express the needs of the characters at particular times. So the film moves along, quite realistically, until a situation comes along where one or more characters bursts into a Beatles song, such as, say, Strawberry Fields. At that point, the movie becomes unrealistic, but perhaps convincing in a sort of off-Broadway sense. For me, these moments spoil the movie. I could endure Evan singing her songs, though they were pitched often very high indeed. Evan hit every note square, and we learn that she has always been a singer.
She has been quoted as saying that she considers the director of Across the Universe, Julie Taymor, as being ‘amazing.’ Though there may be good reasons for this opinion, I feel that Evan is a particularly innocent person, for reasons that I cannot put into words!
In retrospect, I feel that Evan Rachel Wood might have been almost a perfect model for Helen, the central character in the majority of the stories I have written! Her features are very much in line with how I imagined Helen, but more importantly, I imagined Helen as being simple and innocent in some ways, which is how I perceive Evan to be, though of course we cannot make that conclusion without knowing her more intimately. The character of Helen undergoes surgery twice, each time losing her memory; temporarily the first time, and more permanently the second time. At the end of the saga (of ten odd stories), I depicted Helen as more Evan-like than ever. In addition, the artist, Halchroma, who illustrated many of the covers of the Helen series for Smashwords, depicted Helen’s face uncannily on the lines of the face of Evan Rachel Wood. I don’t know whether this is true, but she may have taken Ms. Wood’s face as a model! I’m not going to ask her about it.
The Beatles, and the Vietname War, the drug culture of that era, and the cultural upheaval, is an important part of the history of the century. Perhaps Julie Taymor set out to use the music (and lyrics) of the Beatles as a means for making that era accessible for younger people, but for me, the songs only made the story far more fantastic, and therefore not powerful from an historical point of view. Anyway, there are some good points to this movie, and you have to decide for yourself whether you want to watch it. It even features Joe Cocker in three roles, Bono (of U2 fame), and a couple more familiar faces I could not place.
Kay
