newcritics

Todd Haynes wheeling, kaleidoscopic Bob Dylan biopic, I’m Not There, is so dazzlingly fresh and original that it makes me wonder what went wrong with movies over the past thirty years.

How did cinema turn from an enterprise entered into by the bravest creative minds–people like Welles, Fellini, Buñuel, Goddard or even Warhol, people willing to explode forms and determined to pursue original visions–turning instead into a pablum factory tooled to mass produce the likes of Fred Claus and National Treasure 2 to the exclusion of all other output.

Next to I’m Not There even the best new movies seem banal, childish and dull.

I still wonder if any but the most Talmudicly obsessed Dylanologists will be able to follow the film–a densely packed fun house fantasia of Dylanisms (my guess is that 75% or more of the language in the film comes directly from Dylan songs, interviews and epigrams; I think I recognized most of them). But so what. This movie is for us. (It’s also screamingly hilarious, stuffed with inside jokes which completely eluded the audience of 50- and 60-something boomers with whom I saw the film. How could they watch in stony silence as a tent full of Black Panthers–surreally displaced on massage tables at a posh hotel/spa–try, unsuccessfully, to explicate Ballad of a Thin Man? My wife and I were the only ones in the theater laughing out loud.)

The movie is, of course, Dylanesque, by which I mean it is non-linear, allusive, mercurial (natch), unconcerned with pleasing its audience, and strangely superficial. By superficial I don’t mean that the movie lacks substance, but that its substance lives on its surface, bouncing off it and disappearing out of reach like a rock skimmed on a lake. This is, after all, a movie about a performing artist who launches his career by trying to inhabit an idealized personality, finds himself trapped in a popular personality only partially of his own devising, and finally lives out his days hiding in plain sight from fans and family alike in a stoic deadpan personality while the world relentlessly tries to peel back the layers
of the onion.

Haynes’ trope–interlocking narratives in which six actors of varying ages, races, and genders play Dylanesque characters who are nonetheless NOT Bob Dylan–is brilliantly effective, most especially in the portrayal by 13-year-old Marcus Carl Franklin of the out-of-time, teenage, would-be Woody Guthrie who left the Dinkytown Minneapolis folk scene and concocted a ludicrous backstory for himself (runaway, circus performer, hobo) that, nevertheless, many people on the Bleeker Street folk scene in New York seemed so desperate to believe in 1962. Marcus, baby-faced and African American, carrying Woody Guthrie’s guitar, jumping a box car and spinning Dylan’s first, self-mythologizing origin story to a couple of enraptured hobos, is the movie’s cleverest joke at once goofing on the white folk scene’s naive preconceptions about authenticity and at the same time recalling Steve Martin’s old stand up routine on a similar theme (”I was born a poor black child…”).

The movie’s least interesting portrayal is Cate Blanchett’s 1966 amphetamine crazed hipster Dylan doppelganger Jude Quinn. Don’t get me wrong, the performance will probably get the actress an Oscar nomination. It’s exceptional, a remarkably dead-on piece of physical mimicry that covers Dylan’s most creative musical period, clearly concocted after the actress spent hours watching DA Pennebaker’s mostly unscreened footage of the legendary 1966 tour (including the famous, never-released but oft-bootlegged scene in which a wasted Dylan rides through London in a cab with John Lennon). But it is also the movie’s most conventional biopic performance, the kind of impersonation that won kudos for Jamie Foxx and Phillip Seymour Hoffman but which stands out as palely normal in this otherwise wildly abnormal film.

Watson criticizes the film for insufficiently trying to connect the development of the man with the development of the music, but for my money one of the best things about the film is the way it eschews the horrid biopic cliches–watching Ray Charles play “I’ve Got a Woman” for his girlfriend and putting in her mouth the kind of plot exposition dialog that in no way resembles real human speech (”Ray, that’s a secular version of the Southern Tones record, you can’t do that”…blah blah blah, yuck).

I also disagree strongly with Jacob Rubin who wrote in The New Republic:

Haynes’s impulse is spot-on, then, to present Dylan’s life as a work of art unto itself, a knowing artifice…But in rightly portraying Dylan as a kind of timeless song, I’m Not There fails to acknowledge the cost Dylan, as a mortal man, had to pay. It is a painful trade-off, after all: to choose to be a worse person in order to be a better artist, a trade-off Dylan, who often dropped friends and lovers…to pursue his muse, so intensely embodies and one absent from the film.

But I’m Not There offers nothing so much as a portrait of the artist willfully alienating himself from all humanizing contact–admittedly less so for artistic reasons than to avoid the pain of emotional discovery. It’s not a pretty picture. And if Haynes fails to explicitly line out how that impulse connects with Dylan’s ability to communicate instead through the intermediary of song, well, it’s a movie about the impulses of the sausage-maker and our obsession with him, not a cooking show about how to make sausage.

Still, the movie IS a biopic, and suffers from some of the flaws of the genre, most notably, the movie seems to lose interest in its subject after his most fertile artistic years are over. The last 25 years of Dylan’s career are all but absent in the film (only a too brief section devoted to Dylan’s fascinating late 1970s Christian period hints that the changeling still hasn’t stopped changing).

But my favorite aspects of the movie are the ones that transform biographical events into allegorical, image-driven enchantments, the best of which belong to Haynes’ representation of the basement tapes period–the summer of 1967 when Dylan, at the height of his fame and at the fevered pitch of the counterculture, disappeared from the public eye, holing up in upstate New York with bandmates, raising a family and playing drunken covers of oldtime tunes in the basement.

There’s no band or family in Haynes’ fantasy representation. Instead Dylan is an aging Billy the Kid (Richard Gere) who, having secretly escaped the lawman’s bullet, is living out his days in hiding in a cabin in the woods on the outskirts of the town of Riddle, Missouri. (Looking out over the woods Billy can see the napalm flares of the Vietnam War superimposed in the distance.) The townsfolk seem either unaware of or unconcerned about Billy’s true identity, and Billy seems blissfully unaware of the fact that the town–populated with Basement Tapes characters like Homer, Mrs. Henry, and Tiny Montgomery–has collapsed, like the counter-culture itself, in a paroxysm of suicide and self-destruction after word comes that the the government will be putting a six lane highway through all this backwoods mystery.

On the verge of discovery by his old nemesis (the law man Pat Garrett) Billy flees, jumping the same box car that “Woody Guthrie” jumped at the start of the film. It’s the quintessential Dylan moment–flight at the instant of human connection and discovery, the drifter’s escape–and if it leaves the film with an ending that is less than fully satisfying, it offers perhaps the only true ending other than death.

The final sequence also gives us the key both to how Dylan’s vision of America works, and how Haynes has chosen to organize this dizzily multi-voiced film. “It’s like getting yesterday, today, and tomorrow all into the same room,” Kris Kristofersen says in voice over as the train pulls away. Indeed.

BTW, for a fantasic survey of Bob Dylan on film check out J. Hoberman’s Dallas Observer piece Bob Dylan: Like a Complete Unknown.