Thursday, January 03, 2008
You start to realize that Todd Haynes has nailed it, produced something close to a miracle, a reasonably big budget motion picture with A-list players that is as intelligent as its audience, even before you’re through the opening titles to I’m Not There. Very close to the last thing I did in 2007 was finally get together with a number of friends, have a big old Cajun meal at Carmines & head over to the Bryn Mawr Film Institute where the so-called Dylan biopic is finally playing, albeit only at 1:30 in the afternoon & 9:45 at night. Tho the Bryn Mawr, in spite of its collegiate name, tends to skew to boomers, we saw it in a large theater with a sparse crowd – had everyone else see this film downtown? Or is it that the absence of a
It’s not any single shot that convinces you of this at first – tho some of them are stunners, especially the pans of lines at what appear to be homeless shelters or food missions – is that Moondog waiting in line? – as it is the constant shuffle between shots, now in black & white, now in color, this image grainy, that one clear as contemporary cinema can manufacture. Everything you’ve ever heard about six different actors portraying Dylan, not one of them actually named either Dylan or Zimmerman, pales against the realization that this film is not six sequential vignettes, but rather going to be a continual shuffle of all six, from beginning to end, that its fundamental commitment is to keep you off balance from train ride to train ride. That is a brilliant challenge to take on, probably the most difficult thing any director can attempt. The film that follows is not perfect, but it is damn near close enough to keep all its major promises.
I had found myself finally approaching this film with some trepidation – how many times have I heard great things about a film only to be let down by the actual experience itself, which turned out not to be nearly as terrific as the film I’d imagined beforehand? I was almost certain that having heard so many of my friends – and especially my poet friends – rave on about I’m Not There, that I was in for another round of that experience. To my surprise, it was quite the opposite. I’d long ago stopped believing that American cinema could make a film like this – this was a level of complexity only possible in the longpoem – so when I actually began to realize just what Haynes was doing, I had a hard time sitting still in my seat. The last time I was this excited in a theater was probably the opening night for Antonioni’s Blow-Up or Godard’s Weekend, both of which came out 40 years ago. Those films at the time struck me – as does I’m Not There – as miracles, moments when the collaborative process that is a movie has come together to produce something extraordinary.
The secret to I’m Not There is simple – everyone knows the story, even down to the bullshit fictions of a childhood that Dylan put out early in his career, so there is no need here to tell it again (indeed, the weakest moments in the film are the few instances where Haynes does feel the need to recreate an historic moment, as such, whether it’s debacle of the civil rights award speech, Dylan the born-again preacher, the reaction to Maggie’s Farm at Newport, which Haynes at least has the sense to satirize – right down to Pete Seeger with the ax – or the fact that Dylan was always credited by the Beatles as being the first one to turn them onto drugs). Instead, I’m Not There most often references, alludes, plays with the details. Thus a twelve-year-old African American who calls himself Woody Guthrie finds himself riding boxcars with hoboes & tells them he’s been writing songs for Carl Perkins & playing backup for Bobby Vee (which in fact Dylan briefly did, Vee’s band being the one post-doo-wop Tin Pan Alley act to come out of the same Midwest North Country as little Bobby Z). It’s a point, like having Guthrie’s motto – This Machine Kills Fascists – scrawled on his guitar case, that makes sense only to a knowing audience (or, much later, Cate Blanchett as the Mighty Jude Quinn, alluding in passing to Brian Jones “and his groovy cover band”).
If you don’t know Bob Dylan, if you don’t know the details of the lore surrounding him, I’m Not There is apt to seem entirely opaque – why is a tarantula crawling across the screen? Why does Blanchett ride a motorbike off screen followed by the sound of a crash & a single (now suddenly in color) image of bike & body covered in the woods? Why do Quinn & Arthur Rimbaud & Jack Rollins seem so completely uncomfortable in their own skins when questioned & prodded by the media? What’s going on here with this paunchy, scraggly, middle-aged Billy the Kid, portrayed by, of all people, former “Sexiest Man in the World” (and one-time Paoli resident) Richard Gere? Most of the reviews – even extremely positive ones like that of Roger Ebert – have seemed at a loss with this sequence in Riddle,
Besides the story that everybody already knows, the other elements that hold this fabulous collage together are (1) Haynes’ sense of rhythm, which he only loses once or twice as scenes carry on too long (cf. the aforementioned Beatles’ appearance in the midst of the too-long run-up to the revelation of a BBC producer – made to look & sound exactly like George Plimpton – as Mr. Jones).; and (2) Cate Blanchett’s ballsy spot-on performance. Because the six Dylan surrogates and their tales are shuffled throughout, Blanchett’s on screen continually from beginning to end. If there ever was any question that she’s the best actor of our generation, this should put it to rest. There isn’t any role for which she wouldn’t be the right performer – she could do Barack Obama, Tony Soprano or Jabba the Hut if she had to, and she’d make a great Tinkerbell. Here you will be shocked to recognize afterwards just how many times her performance made you realize (a) oh yeah, Dylan’s a woman, (b) this really isn’t a guy in this role and, conversely, just how much of the time you were completely oblivious to the question of gender altogether. It’s never really the point Haynes is making, tho he clearly wants us to consider the degree to which Dylan benefits from being in touch with his feminine side (which is why the material confronting Dylan’s unreconstructed sexism – “I love women. Really I do. I think everyone should have one.” – is so important).
Haynes’ strategy makes great sense in trying to tell the story of someone for whom the contradictions are what matter most. I’ve noted before that my favorite part of any motion picture is almost always that period at the beginning where the viewer is being pummeled by details that have not yet gelled into a coherent & increasingly narrow narrative that resolves finally into a chase scene. Haynes has made a motion picture that strives to be entirely composed of opening moments. It’s amazing just how much of this he’s able to do. As the credits began rolling, I said out loud “I could see that again tomorrow.” When the time comes, I’m Not There clearly is a film to buy, rather than just rent.
¹ One of the small surprises of the film is just how much of the singing is Dylan himself, not the recordings of the “sound track” double CD, even tho that turns out to be the best collection of Dylan covers ever assembled.
My main issue with the film is that because each of the narrative strains is pure pastiche, each runs the risk of coming off as much a cliche as a comment on a cliche.
The Richard Gere narrative is gorgeously rendered, but in the end, it's a pastiche of all the Westerns Mel Brooks parodied in *Blazing Saddles*: small town being run off for railroad real estate.
The Heath Ledger narrative features excellent performances, especially from Charlotte Gainsbourg, but with its fixation on telephone imagery, it's more a quotation of *The Wall* than a narrative in its own right. Emotionally distant rock star cannot connect to loved ones.
Even the Blanchett narrative winds up feeling more like a quote of every film that has tried to "do" Andy Warhol or the 60s Swinging Scene, from *The Doors* to *I Shot Andy Warhol* to *Austin Powers*.
Finally, I resented the fact that, along with so many other films about artists, Haynes couldn't find a filmic language to represent the artistic process itself. There is a brief, lovely scene in which Jude Quinn writes *Tarantula*, with scraps of magazines and books layed out in a stunning geometical pattern (another quotation from *The Wall*). But just as The Doors managed to record several terrible LPs -- which we'd never know from Stone's terrible film -- so too did Dylan manage to write and record countless brilliant albums. *Don't Look Back* even offers some biographical insight into how Dylan wrote, but Haynes is more concerned with images of images.
As a film about images, it's particularly strong. Haynes could have re-read Greil Marcus's book about The Basement Tapes, which connects Dylan to a rich vein of cultural material that Haynes really only mines in the Billy the Kid sequences. But Haynes has a more arch tone than Marcus, best seen when Marcus Carl Franklin's Guthrie character is confronted by a very stereotypical black female character who at once inspires Guthrie and deflates him: "He's talking about the Depression and it's 1959." Still, Haynes cannot resist the temptation of the Authentic Black Female Working Class Muse: "Sing your own time," she begs Guthrie. More deflation would redeem the cliches Haynes is consciously working with.
For me, *I'm Not There* reminded me of Ishmael Reed's early novels. All are about an artist's attempt to find an image -- fugitive slave, gunslinger, HooDoo gumshow -- of artistic freedom. But whereas Reed always keeps one eye winking at the audience, as if to say, "Sure, these are cliched plots, but I'm twisting them all up against themselves," Haynes lets the images of images get the better of him. Like the suckers in Plato's Cave, Haynes too often mistakes his shadows for the real thing. And so fails to learn the lesson his own film wants to teach us: Dylan is masks all the way down. There's no "authentic" Dylan beyond all the different performances and fantasies Dylan lived out.
Perfectly obvious admission by the author of Ketjak and Tjanting.
Certainly there's worse things than re-doing the new wave out there, and I'm very glad Haynes exists. Someday he'll do a movie as rattling and ferocious as Safe again. I just felt his sense of rhythm here, his command or what have you, like in Velvet Goldmine, was nothing like the claims many are making for it. It's nice he gives himself permission to play around and take risks, that's rare, and maybe in US film right now there's nothing else one can get funding for, but to my ear he didn't do very much special with that permission, & so the music had to largely carry it (again).
yrs,
Brent
Great review, Ron. Dare I say that you and Mathew Dessem (who reviews Criterion Collection DVD's on his blog) are perhaps two of the finest independent film reviewers I've read?
I like it as much as Safe, which is saying a lot (though the arguments for them are entirely different). It's true that it's not as "rattling and ferocious" (I can't think of another film as uncomfortable as Safe), but I think Haynes' compositional sense just keeps getting better.
I'd say that the narrative strains are highly impure pastiche--more specifically, that they leak into each other, and outside the film, in ways that are unique in narrative cinema. Your note, Ron, about Haynes' stringing-out of the sense of opening for as long as possible, seems right to me--except that it's not so much a matter of possibility as of reaching a threshold, beyond which our entire view of the relation of the narratives changes (I wrote a long blog post about this recently). Instead of gelling, it forms a complex of crystals.
It's funny, but I didn't even think of Dylan's Tarantula when I saw the spider--I though of Nietzsche (the text Ginsberg is reading is the "Tarantula" bit from Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Leave it to me to miss the obvious.
It's not true that you need to be well-versed in Dylan lore; my pal Rick, who knows very little about that, saw it three times and loved it. Of course, he caught the Rimbaud, Fellini, Godard, Help references and such, so there was plenty of intertextual candy.
The things that some folks here are calling derivative (in so many words) are all direct quotations (indeed, images of images), which is a different thing: shots almost verbatim from 8 1/2 and Juliet, the Beatles film, Godard, material from Tony Snow, quotes of Fassbinder, others. Haynes "covering" the cinema while various artists cover Dylan's songs.
i didn't think of the "San Rafael period" thing, probably because the Gere sequence is so thoroughly the world of the Basement Tapes and its cover, but maybe also because Dylan's comeback (though I like a lot of Oh Mercy and Love and Theft) seems to lack the profusion of giddy possibility that, to me, characterizes the end of the film (not to mention that Gere/Billy's "comeback" involves sticking his neck out in a local political situation--which seems like an intentional contrast to Dylan's withdrawal and evasiveness--one of the ways in which Billy occupies the point of least correspondence to the biographical Dylan in a film in which degrees of such distance gradually take on a major functional role).
Great biographies proceed by building up a composite picture of a person through first hand account, quotation, and dry, verified, fact. Boswell's Johnson is a perfect example. Behrman's Beerbohm is another.
This latest film can hardly hope to be more than a fictionalized "interpretation" of events which are far enough away from us in time and change, that poetic license and "technique" are accepted as relevant adjuncts (fake fact) to what really happened.
Dylan understood the relationship between what his songs were intended to stand for, and the reality of his life as a pop icon. That's why he effectively distances himself from the philosophical content of the work by claiming it was all a strategic use. That's a true statement. As much as we'd like to believe in the deep current of lyrical, warm sentiment in the ballads and diatribes, we're responding to a synthesis of stylistic methodologies which coalesced at a moment in time--NOT to self-evident "truths". Dylan was never a "thinker." Perhaps, like Harry Callahan, another "unconscious" American genius.
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