For all the talk of the deep weirdness of I'm Not There - a splintered anti-biopic that divides Bob Dylan's '60s and '70s heyday between six Bob-like characters - it still has a story to tell. Unfortunately, it's a story that requires Cliffs Notes; I say this with certainty because the Arclight was handing mini-guides out before the screening. As a folkie whose taste skews more towards Neil Young and Joni Mitchell (not to mention Peter, Paul & Mary) than his Bobness, I wasn't sure how impenetrable I'd find it. But despite being laden with references that I'm sure went over my head like so much idiot wind, there are more than enough landmarks of the Dylan myth - the motorcycle accident, the divorce that inspired 1975's Blood on the Tracks, going electric ("Judas!") - for even casual fans to revel in. [Continue reading...]
The heart of the film comes from the performances of two women: first, Cate Blanchett's tour de force take on Jude Quinn (...the eskimo), which is in turn a take on 1965-era Dylan-on-speed's rampage through England. Nailing Dylan's one-of-a-kind vocal cadence and his jittery antagonism, she presents Quinn as a self-martyring icon trapped in a world partially of his own making. The best sequence - which you can watch above - finds Quinn in a rare moment of enthusiasm at meeting Allen Ginsberg. Finally, a peer rather than a prosecutor! Meanwhile, Charlotte Gainsbourg's long-suffering wife unveils Heath Ledger-as-Dylan's (well sort of - he plays an actor playing Christian Bale playing yet another Dylan) growing pessimism in the face of the interminable Vietnam War. The various threads, filmed in appropriately different styles, tie together in these sometimes clever, peripheral ways, but anyone with a passing knowledge of the Dylan myth shouldn't have much trouble sewing them up.
If anything, the film's weakness is forgetting one of its hero's greatest strengths: storytelling unhindered by indulgence or needless experimentation. Intent on being as anti-Establishment as the man himself, I'm Not There is too long at 2 hours and 15 minutes, some 20 of which - including the interesting but tangential Richard Gere arc - could stand to go. But Gere - as Billy the Kid, an outlaw who finds he can never escape the law (and symbolically, Dylan's unwanted role as the voice of a generation) - serves a purpose; the grimy interludes of stock news footage and the twice-repeated pointless rapid-fire shots of the six Dylans in succession (during which you can practically hear director Todd Haynes yelling at the audience, "Get it? Get it?") are less essential.
Still, I'm Not There succeeds in painting a remarkably fresh portrait of one of pop music's most confounding icons. A great movie exists within the bloated runtime, though perhaps the length is to be expected: As much as Haynes would hate to admit it, this is very much a Bob Dylan biopic - just like "Like a Rolling Stone" is very much a folk song. A-changin' indeed.
Bob Dylan - "I Want You": mp3
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Deeper into Movies is a Yo La Tengo song and, in this case, a film review column. Click below for more.
Labels: Deeper Into Movies, Film and Television
posted by David Greenwald @ 7:22 AM 
Comments (10)
thanks for the review - your reviews seem to be pretty spot on (even when it comes to hot dogs - hebrew natl rules!) btw, i just listened to that left banke i had scored from your blog. i forgot that you had posted it next to 'black cab' - as soon as i heard the intro it all came rushing back - uncanny. for my money, 'pretty ballerina' is is the best left banke cut. oh, and thanks for posting those 'big star' covers - i just scored '#1 record' and have you to thank for opening my eyes (or ears i guess) to the album. cheers!
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You wrote, "If anything, the film's weakness is forgetting one of its hero's greatest strengths: storytelling unhindered by indulgence or needless experimentation... the grimy interludes of stock news footage and the twice-repeated pointless rapid-fire shots of the six Dylans in succession (during which you can practically hear director Todd Haynes yelling at the audience, "Get it? Get it?") are less essential."
I don't think the film "forgets" Dylan's ability to tell stories without "indulgence" so much as it makes a conscious decision to tell his story through the cinema of that period. Most of the film takes its stylistic cues by mashing up sixties films - Masculin-Feminin, 8 1/2, Don't Look Back, A Hard Day's Night, the films of Warhol. What the decision says, and whether it's successful on its own terms, is another matter entirely.
I'm with you in that I had a problem with a lot of the in-your-face "Get it? Get it?" moments too. I'm not sure how much of that is my preference for certain styles of filmmaking, and I'm also not sure how much of the "Get it?" stuff was itself a reference - again, to sixties films, and the movement during that decade toward adopting in-your-face, Brechtian ideas from the theatre and applying them to film.
J. Hoberman touches on that tension you're responding to - Brecht vs. naturalism - in his Village Voice essay (http://www.villagevoice.com/film/0747,hoberman,78422,20.html/full)
"Haynes is not what one would call a natural filmmaker. His ideas are too evident, his schemata overly present. He is, however, a sort of natural Brechtian: His actors are always 'quoting.'"
The gunshots you mention are right out of Godard - the individual most responsible for breaking Brecht into cinema - along with a million other things in the movie (the "it wasn't the film we had dreamed" voice-over, the flashes of text on screen, breaking the fourth wall, perhaps even the references to Rimbaud - whom Godard quoted in his films - and Gainsbourg's character).
Larry Gross takes the film's connection to Godard even further with a pretty brilliant piece in Film Comment (http://www.filmlinc.com/fcm/so07/imnotthere.htm):
"But besides these clues, there’s the film’s commitment to devices from the Godard playbook: pastiche, allusion, quotation, the use of actors to construct allegorical or phantasmatic images of people rather than plausibly represent or incarnate them, the utilization of stars not purely to recruit audiences but to inspire reflection on the multiplicity of identity and the illusion of a coherent self. Godard pioneered the use of these strategies."
Whereas Hoberman's piece is useful because he brings so much else about Dylan in, Gross gets pretty far into piecing apart the method to I'm Not There's madness.
One of the most thematically loaded moments occurs when Ledger's and Gainsbourg's characters finally watch the Bob Dylan movie, and Haynes quotes the Godard voice-over: "It wasn’t the film we had dreamed, the film we all carried in our hearts, the film we wanted to make and, secretly, wanted to live."
Gross nails it on the head: "Such a cinema was no longer merely a representation of or 'about' people’s lives but rather a tool for directly inventing them."
He also keenly notes that Godard, Warhol, and Dylan (the three overriding artist personalities of the sixties, all three of whom hover over the film) all traded in decentralized personas, and that the Godard film that Haynes cribs from the most (Masculin-Feminin) was the only major one of its era to name-drop Dylan.
...Anyway, that's my roundabout, quotation-filled defense of the film's stylistic decisions, many of which I'm not sure may have even worked. But I think the film is justified for being more about the relationship between the catch-all issue of "identity" and sixties art/cinema/culture than about "storytelling unhindered."
Interesting. Well, those are all references I don't have readily available - I can see some of the Godard stuff now but I guess I'll have to see more of those films to piece everything together. I still think it's messy and overlong, though.
And that all makes the Vietnam stuff feel more out of place, I think. But I guess he's trying to create a contrast.
It was pretty messy. You're right about the Richard Gere section, a lot of it just didn't work dramatically - chasing his dog around, what the fuck? - and the fact that most of it was at the end made it that much more difficult to sit through. You could have hit all the important parts of that - the Billy the Kid reference, the brass band performance, tying it back into the beginning, the fucking giraffe if you must - in a matter of a couple minutes.
I also didn't like the part with the kid - it was just so wooden and heavy-handed and that underwater sequence was like something from Across the Universe.
The film didn't always handle drama so well. All the "big moments" - the Judas thing, the dude trying to cut the cords with the axe - felt so staged and self-important, like something out of a conventionally mythologizing biopic such as "Ray." The BBC dude was a one-dimensional nemesis; pinning "Ballad of a Thin Man" on him cheapened the song, I really didn't like that sequence.
Yeah, I didn't like any of that stuff either but I thought the kid stuff was great minus the river sequence.
Alfred needs to start using em dashes.
Oh to hell with em dashes
Amazingly, I have yet to see the film. But I certainly plan to. You're review was very convincing.
So while I check out "I'm Not There," why don't you check out my new novel, BLOOD ON THE TRACKS.
It's a murder-mystery. But not just any rock superstar is knocking on heaven's door. The murdered rock legend is none other than Bob Dorian, an enigmatic, obtuse, inscrutable, well, you get the picture...
Suspects? Tons of them. The only problem is they're all characters in Bob's songs.
You can get a copy on Amazon.com or go "behind the tracks" at www.bloodonthetracksnovel.com to learn more about the book.
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