I'm Not There

In being a great devourer of Bob Dylan, I have had more often the pleasure than not, to englut and subject this self to nigh everything the man has produced and grazed: his feeble forays into prose and cinema - Tarantula and Renaldo and Clara, respectively, his cameos in others' works: Sam Peckinpah's 1973 Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid and Larry Charles' 2003 Masked and Anonymous, along with every bootleg and interview I could seize my hands and ears upon; this is the unforgivable ignorance of worship within youth, in particular when you decree everything a masterwork predicated solely on past glories. I've since cooled to Dylan, remembering his past presence though unmoved to fall any true thought atop him.

Having known of Todd Haynes' 2007 I'm Not There and its crux - six different actors playing each a character based on but not quite Bob Dylan - well before its release, I was all no and neuroses, believing, fearing that this was a mistake and an impossibility to pull off. Thus was the reason for my abstaining from it until this past week. This known and said, having my frights fleshed albeit on a television screen, I was merely minorly disappointed for my expectations had dwindled to crumbs at this point.

I suppose I shall commence by giving a precis of each Dylan in order of their emerging. The first incarnation we fully encounter is a young black boy (Marcus Carl Franklin) who calls himself Woody Guthrie with "This Machine Kills Fascists" scrawled about his guitar case and all, this owed to the real Dylan's obsession with the real Guthrie when he first began his career. The child recounts stories he's doubtless created and rehearsed in a mirror in assembling his legend. He takes up then with a family where he sings and they feed him. He soon leaves after a descent into reality via the matriarch who sees through him and the talk of boxcars, by telling him to sing of his own time, after his fraud being found out he hops another train where he is accosted by hobos who attempt to rob him. To escape, he jumps from the moving train to be met by a river. He awakens in a hospital finding that a couple has salvaged him and is subsequently taken in by them. He is soon found out anew this time when a phone call by a youth correctional center is received by the family which leads to his leaving to seek out the true Woody Guthrie who lay now decaying in a hospital room in New Jersey. The young Woody delivers flowers and songs to his namesake.

The theme of being "made" and seen through and the subsequent fleeing is a recurring one that wields not as much power as one would expect. This will be further illumed in the imminent descriptions of each remaining Dylan.

Our second surrogate is Arthur Rimbaud (yes, christened after that Arthur Rimbaud), he portrays Dylan as the poet he'd always been weakly described as by critics. I see no point in these moments in the film, they are worthless truly. We have the cardboard Ben Winshaw as Rimbaud spilling ceaseless quips and quotes of life and art intermittently besprinkled within the film that become boring, repetitious, and ultimately unnecessary.

Third up is Christian Bale as Jack Rollins, Dylan as "the folk singing prophet and voice of a generation", creator of the "finger pointing songs" of the early 1960's. His story and housed and heard in the form of a documentary where we are assaulted by various fictional talking heads, namely Alice Fabian (Julianne Moore as Joan Baez?) telling how he touched them, how great he was, essentially blowing him. The recreation of settings is superb; the early performances; "The Times They Are A-Changing" on black and white television and Rollins gently relaying "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll" to a small a crowd on a farm. The echoing of actions and interviews are something of a different strain entirely. When Rollins shakes in anxiety while being interviewed you don't believe it, just as much as when he claims to have seen "something that Lee Harvey Oswald felt in him." Only the real Dylan could behave and feel such a way and make them feel authentic for this was the character he'd spent his existence up to that point cultivating. Certainly not any one or six actors could have shifted my perception on this, regardless of how much they look or sound like him. Rollins occurs again, as a preacher reformed from his past lives, seized by Christianity. What troubles me is that we are never given full reason for this need and conversion, only a new talking head who told him to pray one day. Dylan die-hards know why and Haynes' commentary expounds, but the casual viewer is left with only a thin answer.

Next we get Heath Ledger as Robbie Clark, an actor who portrays Jack Rollins in a biopic. This tale tells of how Robbie and his wife Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg) met became rapt within each other and ultimately unraveled. Their relationship seems to sustain for as long as the Vietnam War does. This section just as the others never plunges beyond the surface which is a shame because this is primed material properly ripened. Gainsbourg carves what she can given the material, but we are only allowed the same uniformity that films' depictions of marriage these days seem to be about; the husband ignores the wife, fucks other women, and regrets it only when its too late.

Since I've known Cate Blanchett was to recreate Bob Dylan, I was afraid, in especial since she won an Oscar for her impression of Katherine Hepburn in The Aviator , and was nominated for her attempt at Jude Quinn, Dylan's electric period mirroring, in this film. This was expected; the mimicry and mere skimming of flesh, but never to this extent. Of Dylan's creative peak, the one that sired the triad of Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde, we are met with the flower and never the root, which is not the folk facet of out hero, but the true person, before everything. The film gives itself opportunity when reporter Keenan Jones (the ever good Bruce Greenwood) exposes Quinn on television as being from a suburban, middle class Massachusetts family. Instead of choosing to plumb Quinn's emotions and motives, we get him moiling about a typewriter avenging himself creatively, scored by David Cross as Allen Ginsberg reading a passage about revenge from Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Yeah, Allen Ginsberg shows up at some point of this story on a golf cart as Quinn is being interviewed by Jones. His presence is as superfluous as Michelle Williams' as Coco Rivington, an ersatz Edie Sedgwick, in a dream sequence that echoes 8 1/2 , whom Quinn wants after an earlier unseen incident. They exchange odd barbs and Quinn resigns. Decadence seizes this passage of the film, where we glimpse the rock star life: drugs, parties, more drugs, etc. and never an eye into the creative process. There's nothing here to grab hold of aside from the musical interludes which are weakened by forcing Jones the reporter into the role of Mr. Jones from "Ballad of a Thin Man". Such could probably box the entire of my thoughts on the film, but there is more.

Richard Gere embodies Dylan as the recluse, Billy the Kid, who retreats from the world after, the viewer is never sure of, but fans of Dylan will see it as the mirroring of Dylan's burrowing into obscurity into Woodstock, New York after a 1967 motorcycle accident. The town, Riddle, is flooded of death - murder and suicide and the ruin rained by Pat Garrett (Bruce Greenwood again) with Greenwood portraying what threatens to slay the artist anew. Billy confronts Garrett on Halloween at the funeral of a young girl, asking Garrett to leave town. Billy is immediately arrested. He soon escapes, hops a train sees his dog who'd run away earlier and departs. Finding the guitar case that reads "This Machine Kills Fascists", we gather this is the concluding bookend to Woody's story and thus Dylan's life hitherto. And all ends with footage of the real Dylan atop stage from 1966.

I agnize the urge to limn Dylan so freely and unconventionally, but when the attempts sing futile and feeble with each actor, aside from Richard Gere, embodying ever impersonation and never immersion, all fails. The vertiginous effect of never settling screams of Haynes not believing in his material for had he, he would've had one actor inhabit this panoply of personae or focus on one event in each of his character's lives. For he doesn't, his attempts transcend never gimmick nor hipster preening. Perchance the mimetic was Haynes' intent; a Post Modern punching and poking at the biopic. Though I doubt it, if it was, he has succeeded. But Dylan is of himself, a self-supplying cannibal, the Ouroboros and only he could make such feelings, every tremble and every bon mot real. All these avatars did was show and denude how much of an act Mr. Zimmerman truly was, is

The film's second most salient failing is the wishing to spread itself over every corner and crevice of existence, a common reason most biopics fail. This cubist circus could have gotten away with its most prevalent theme of rebirth were it not so blatant and unballasted by the past. Each time his mask/armor is obliterated either by himself (Jack Rollins) or someone else (Jones' undoing of Quinn), he retreats within himself and emerges someone new, a flesh assembled tabula rasa, acknowledging rarely if ever the catalyst and/or the past.

Haynes' aping of Godard and Fellini are without neither pretense nor piling of the director's own ideas. They play as homely homage, simply stagnating. This is thin compared to the act of echo and recreation as in Woody Allen's masterful Another Woman, where the main character, a woman of fifty encounters in a daydream her brother as a teenager and he unbosoms he feelings, his wishes and fears. Taking its cue from Ingmar Bergman's Wild Strawberries, Allen cores into emotion in a frightening way, building off his Swedish antecedent, not merely tracing it.

The film is nude of revelation, which is something I believe needed in the biopic. What has rendered this man this way; what is he eluding? Why? Not that we need answers, but hell, an acknowledgment or two toward his pathology, his impulses and his emotions would have sung sufficience. All we are presented are grazings of the surface, beauteous visuals, and hollow mimicry.

This may have been too mountainous an assaying for Haynes and all involved. His smaller films: Safe and Far From Heaven play more coherent in all spheres than this and even his simple, diluted Velvet Goldmine. I seek not narrative as most detractors of this film do, simply truth and revelation.

The soundtrack to the film is a more revelatory experience playing as variorum, from first to finish with contributions from pillars as sundry as Stephen Malkmus and Roger McGuinn, which renders as a whole more the gradual unfurling of a career and life than the film's hurried unraveling.

In finishing, with all I've written said, I cannot wholly not recommend this film, for it is hypnotic and enthralling within even its failings. Perhaps I am biased for I am a Dylan fan, perhaps a film about a man so infinitely interesting as Dylan cannot and should not be shunned.