| Review | Nov. 25, 2007 | 6:31 pm |
I’m Not There assembles the pieces of Bob Dylan’s myth
By
Dylan the Myth has always been bigger than Dylan the Artist, so it’s no surprise that seeing him live is often an underwhelming experience — at heart, he’s “just a song-and-dance man,” as he’s said, not an icon. His music is quietly spiritual, but his obscured metaphors and shifting personas allude to someone who’s not really there at all. Todd Haynes understands that it’s impossible — or even beside the point — to pin down the real Dylan, which is why his new movie I’m Not There uses pieces of Dylan’s life as shards of a broken national identity. Dylan as nomad (Marcus Carl Franklin), activist (Heath Ledger), folk hero (Richard Gere), Jesus freak (Christian Bale) and frustrated poet (Cate Blanchett) collectively speak to who we are: a confused, conflicted and fucked-up paradox.
The truest thing you can say about Dylan is that he’s always moving on to somewhere else. The young, black boy, Woody, who opens I’m Not There hops on trains with his guitar by his side, playing blues songs beyond his age. It’s more than a race-change shtick: Dylan embodies the spirit of African-Americans saddled with inescapable struggle. There’s awkward amusement in the scene when a white, middle-class family saves Woody from death, then finds out that he’s escaped juvenile detention. Using Dylan’s musical poems to evoke the passage of time, I’m Not There resonates most when its characters are torn away from the places they know.
Because I’m Not There isn’t exactly about Dylan himself — by the title’s own admission — it’s frustrating that the media has read the film as an extravagant parroting act. Cate Blanchett gets press because she “manages to pull off Dylan” better than anyone else (!), but her studied drag act is a gimmick, just as the emphasis on the multiple-actor conceit can feel more distracting than illuminating. Beyond the many dizzying references to Dylan’s work and the ‘60s art scene (from The Beatles to Norman Mailer), I’m Not There never coheres into a vision of, well, anything. Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg), Ledger’s wife, earns the most sympathy from the audience; her desire for separation, spurned by Ledger, is interrupted by the news that the Vietnam War has finally ended, a moment that connects Dylan’s evasive myth with the heartache of an entire generation. Other than here, though, most of the running time is filled with giddy, superfluous references to Dylan’s personas — little imitations that light up the screen and then, just as quickly, are gone.
spencer said,
November 25, 2007 @ 8:02 pm
“I’m Not There never coheres into a vision of, well, anything”
I felt the same way for a lot of the movie’s runtime. But by the end, I thought there was a coherent vision it was definitely going for. I’m Not There cares about the way that people conceal themselves. The movie’s Bob Dylan isn’t hard to get at just because he’s multifaceted. It’s because he wanted it to be that way. Fake names, constant flight, self-seclusion, evasive answers, jackass attitudes, shifting music styles — they all stemmed from a fear of being pinned down. I don’t know enough about Dylan to say whether I’m Not There spoke the truth. But at least it did say something.
Paul Schrodt said,
November 25, 2007 @ 8:09 pm
Spencer, I definitely think you’re onto what the movie is trying to say. But because we never glimpse the real Dylan–the one behind the personas and elusive myths–all we’re left is fragments of different eras, references and the sensation of always moving somewhere else. Yes, the black boy, drugged-out Cate Blanchett, and resentful-father Heath Ledger all fear “being pinned down.” But in the end, there’s very little of emotional substance for the audience to cling on to. (Maybe that’s the point, but it makes for a somewhat unsatisfying experience.)
Molly Lafferty said,
November 27, 2007 @ 12:14 am
When it comes down to it, the film you watched is an experimental one. When examining it in the context of conventional Hollywood cinema it does lack that “emotional substance” needed to propel standard narratives forward. And for most people, experimental films generally are unsatisfying, and that’s often the purpose. So in this way your review is right on the mark, but I do have to agree with Spencer in terms of the film’s vision.
Paul Schrodt said,
November 27, 2007 @ 2:27 am
Well it’s not a linear narrative, but I don’t think that’s why I found the film emotionally unsatisfying. There are many experimental movies that affect people deeply–”Tropical Malady”? As a matter of fact, there are moments in “I’m Not There” that resonate powerfully
(I mentioned a couple in my review), but because Haynes is mostly concerned with dancing around Dylan’s elusive personas, the audience loses a grip on any kind of coherent sense of who or what Bob Dylan represents–we’re bombarded with too many references, film styles and in-jokes.