Viewed: In Theatre
Release Date: November 28, 2007
writer: Todd Haynes & Oren Moverman
director: Todd Haynes
I'm going to start by saying I'm not a Bob Dylan fan nor am I overly familiar with his musical repertoire (aside from the obvious "Mr. Tambourine Man"/"Blowing In The Wind"-like songs which are inescapable). Now you may say that since I'm not a Dylan fan I'm therefore not a music fan. Maybe you're right. Regardless.
I'm Not There is a film about Bob Dylan and his music, but it's not a biography. If anything, it's an anti-biography, wiping away any trace of the Walk The Line, La Bamba, Ray-style formula that musical bio-pics tend to fall into. Todd Haynes, a noted avant-garde director, has created a film that is unrestrained by convention, and as such is a marvel of intrigue, if somewhat indecipherable. Fans of Dylan -- the real die hards -- will likely be able to decode the enigma that Haynes projects, and the lay-fan will get it, but for someone like myself it's the beauty of an oil spill. It's a big, disastrous mess, but something still majestic about it that kept me watching well beyond the point of understanding the chaos.
Release Date: November 28, 2007
writer: Todd Haynes & Oren Moverman
director: Todd Haynes
I'm going to start by saying I'm not a Bob Dylan fan nor am I overly familiar with his musical repertoire (aside from the obvious "Mr. Tambourine Man"/"Blowing In The Wind"-like songs which are inescapable). Now you may say that since I'm not a Dylan fan I'm therefore not a music fan. Maybe you're right. Regardless.
I'm Not There is a film about Bob Dylan and his music, but it's not a biography. If anything, it's an anti-biography, wiping away any trace of the Walk The Line, La Bamba, Ray-style formula that musical bio-pics tend to fall into. Todd Haynes, a noted avant-garde director, has created a film that is unrestrained by convention, and as such is a marvel of intrigue, if somewhat indecipherable. Fans of Dylan -- the real die hards -- will likely be able to decode the enigma that Haynes projects, and the lay-fan will get it, but for someone like myself it's the beauty of an oil spill. It's a big, disastrous mess, but something still majestic about it that kept me watching well beyond the point of understanding the chaos.
Haynes has enlisted six actors to portray Dylan analogues, each representing a different aspect of Dylan's life, his songs, or his mythos. Marcus Carl Franklin, a young, black actor goes by the pseudonym Woody Guthrie, a railroad-riding escapee from a juvenile delinquency center in depression-era 1930's. Woody entertains hobos on a train car with his turns of phrase and his knowledge of traditional roots music. Later he befriends a black family and is given the inspiration to grow beyond what he knows and to write and sing about what matters in the present. After an accident, he winds up the guest of a suburban family whom he captivates with his original songs, the promise of an aspiring career ahead of him. Franklin's voice, still youthful, delicate with just a hint of masculinity behind it presents Dylan's tunes not just as a message but as something beautiful.
Christian Bale plays the folk legend Jack Rollins, the man who casts a shadow over the whole genre and represents the apex. But to Rollins, he doesn't see himself the messenger everyone else does. He's a provocateur but that still would imply intent. Through interviews with his ex-girlfriend from the time Alice Fabian (Julianne Moore playing a role I can't even hazard guess as to whom she's emulating) the audience is let in on the difference in attitude Rollins shares from other folk singers of the era: humble, pessimistic, nihilistic even. Eventually Rollins finds God and becomes a minister for his sparsely attended church, his former glories a memory and a message. Bale inhabits the popular cliché of Dylan in Rollins, getting the nuances of his speech and physical demeanour down pat, during one interview sitting atop a stool curled around his guitar as if he wanted to shrink and disappear inside it than talk about himself. At times he casts a splitting-image profile of Dylan which I'm not sure is make-up or Bale's sheer force of will.
By the way he's introduced, I assume that Heath Ledger's Robbie Clark is an split personality of the Jack Rollins-era Dylan. Clark is a film star, a womanizer, a philosopher. He meets and falls in love with a French woman, a painter named Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg). They have a passionate beginning, and a family borne, but Clark's silent and not-so-silent affairs drive a wedge in between them, and Claire finds herself losing more and more focus of who she is the more famous he gets. Ledger's Clarke represents the Dylan family man where all his faults are laid bare, his existentialist dialogue more tiresome than entertaining or insightful to the woman who's been hearing nothing but for years. Of the sub-characterizations, this one takes the focus away from the Dylan archetype and puts it onto his family and the effect his life had on it.
Kate Blanchett has received a much-deserved nomination for her role as Jude Quinn, playing the superstar '60's Dylan who bucks the trends and amps up at a folk festival, travels to England, befriends the Beatles, chases supermodels, antagonizes the press and overdoses on pills. Whereas Bale's Rollins is an impersonation of Dylan (a bang-on one at that), Blanchett plays a caricature, a larger-than-life version of the celebrity whom it would seem everyone wants a piece of (but in a nice juxtaposition, when the Beatles leave the scene, Quinn is met by a handful of press and admirers while the fab four are chased around in the background -- Benny Hill-style -- by a mob of screaming fans. It's Quinn's recent rejection of what made him popular that spurs on this segment, and if there's a centerpiece to the film, this is certainly it. Not only the most straightforward of the stories, but also the most understandable and definable by anyone not entirely familiar with Dylan's story.
A step back into turn-of-the-(20th)-century to a town called Riddle finds a reclusive man played by Richard Gere by the name of Billy (but he goes by many names, we're told). In Riddle, there's people dressed in the most ornate tatters you'll ever see. It's not a prosperous town, but nobody seems depressed either, except for the fact that a six-lane highway is going to be built right over the town. It's up to Billy the Kid to go up against the opposing forces as the voice of reason, but Billy's not the man for the job, even though everyone supports him. His own convictions conflict with how he wants to live his life. It's the most metaphorical of the tales and probably the least necessary of them, but the riddle of Riddle figures into the overall picture as both the start of the story, leading into Woody's tale, and the end of the film.
Throughout, Arthur Rimbaud (Ben Wishaw as a rising-celeb Dylan), sitting in interrogation, spouts his fountain of knowledge, saying what needs to be said as it's apropos to the scenes it interjects into. While there's clear-cut distinctive narratives throughout, they are inter-cut with one another, some in a non-linear fashion, making the puzzle a broader one, the borders improbably expanding.
Haynes uses a number of cinematic techniques to underscore his various metaphors, emulating scenes, designs, angles, effects and more from a host of different films which would take a whole other viewing to call attention to specifics. Haynes strives to evoke Dylan out of the audience more than relate him to them. The soundtrack intersperses covers with originals and the visuals seem to do the same, giving you aspects of real Dylan and things that are just copies. I imagine, though with my inferior Dylan knowledge I can't honestly say, that the film presents a merging of Dylan's storytelling with his real biography, that is the tales he sings about, each injecting a bit of himself are as much used as actual documented footage and interviews in ascertaining his character. And just as much, the lies and stigmas that he's applied to himself are used here to further encapsulate all that he is... and what he is, as ever, is just a storyteller and that's all. These are just some of his stories, encapsulated in this baffling but wonderful experience.
Rating: 4/5
Christian Bale plays the folk legend Jack Rollins, the man who casts a shadow over the whole genre and represents the apex. But to Rollins, he doesn't see himself the messenger everyone else does. He's a provocateur but that still would imply intent. Through interviews with his ex-girlfriend from the time Alice Fabian (Julianne Moore playing a role I can't even hazard guess as to whom she's emulating) the audience is let in on the difference in attitude Rollins shares from other folk singers of the era: humble, pessimistic, nihilistic even. Eventually Rollins finds God and becomes a minister for his sparsely attended church, his former glories a memory and a message. Bale inhabits the popular cliché of Dylan in Rollins, getting the nuances of his speech and physical demeanour down pat, during one interview sitting atop a stool curled around his guitar as if he wanted to shrink and disappear inside it than talk about himself. At times he casts a splitting-image profile of Dylan which I'm not sure is make-up or Bale's sheer force of will.
By the way he's introduced, I assume that Heath Ledger's Robbie Clark is an split personality of the Jack Rollins-era Dylan. Clark is a film star, a womanizer, a philosopher. He meets and falls in love with a French woman, a painter named Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg). They have a passionate beginning, and a family borne, but Clark's silent and not-so-silent affairs drive a wedge in between them, and Claire finds herself losing more and more focus of who she is the more famous he gets. Ledger's Clarke represents the Dylan family man where all his faults are laid bare, his existentialist dialogue more tiresome than entertaining or insightful to the woman who's been hearing nothing but for years. Of the sub-characterizations, this one takes the focus away from the Dylan archetype and puts it onto his family and the effect his life had on it.
Kate Blanchett has received a much-deserved nomination for her role as Jude Quinn, playing the superstar '60's Dylan who bucks the trends and amps up at a folk festival, travels to England, befriends the Beatles, chases supermodels, antagonizes the press and overdoses on pills. Whereas Bale's Rollins is an impersonation of Dylan (a bang-on one at that), Blanchett plays a caricature, a larger-than-life version of the celebrity whom it would seem everyone wants a piece of (but in a nice juxtaposition, when the Beatles leave the scene, Quinn is met by a handful of press and admirers while the fab four are chased around in the background -- Benny Hill-style -- by a mob of screaming fans. It's Quinn's recent rejection of what made him popular that spurs on this segment, and if there's a centerpiece to the film, this is certainly it. Not only the most straightforward of the stories, but also the most understandable and definable by anyone not entirely familiar with Dylan's story.
A step back into turn-of-the-(20th)-century to a town called Riddle finds a reclusive man played by Richard Gere by the name of Billy (but he goes by many names, we're told). In Riddle, there's people dressed in the most ornate tatters you'll ever see. It's not a prosperous town, but nobody seems depressed either, except for the fact that a six-lane highway is going to be built right over the town. It's up to Billy the Kid to go up against the opposing forces as the voice of reason, but Billy's not the man for the job, even though everyone supports him. His own convictions conflict with how he wants to live his life. It's the most metaphorical of the tales and probably the least necessary of them, but the riddle of Riddle figures into the overall picture as both the start of the story, leading into Woody's tale, and the end of the film.
Throughout, Arthur Rimbaud (Ben Wishaw as a rising-celeb Dylan), sitting in interrogation, spouts his fountain of knowledge, saying what needs to be said as it's apropos to the scenes it interjects into. While there's clear-cut distinctive narratives throughout, they are inter-cut with one another, some in a non-linear fashion, making the puzzle a broader one, the borders improbably expanding.
Haynes uses a number of cinematic techniques to underscore his various metaphors, emulating scenes, designs, angles, effects and more from a host of different films which would take a whole other viewing to call attention to specifics. Haynes strives to evoke Dylan out of the audience more than relate him to them. The soundtrack intersperses covers with originals and the visuals seem to do the same, giving you aspects of real Dylan and things that are just copies. I imagine, though with my inferior Dylan knowledge I can't honestly say, that the film presents a merging of Dylan's storytelling with his real biography, that is the tales he sings about, each injecting a bit of himself are as much used as actual documented footage and interviews in ascertaining his character. And just as much, the lies and stigmas that he's applied to himself are used here to further encapsulate all that he is... and what he is, as ever, is just a storyteller and that's all. These are just some of his stories, encapsulated in this baffling but wonderful experience.
Rating: 4/5