Toronto: 'I'm Not There'

Todd Haynes' new film is, as they would say in semiotics class, a dense text. Contrary to pre-release reports, it is not a fictionalized Bob Dylan biopic with six different actors playing Dylan at different phases of his career, as he morphs from persona to persona. No, it's a lot more complicated. The six actors—Cate Blanchett, Richard Gere, Christian Bale, Heath Ledger, Ben Whishaw and Marcus Carl Franklin all play different characters in some way inspired by Dylan's varied personae. African-American Franklin plays an 11-year-old kid who calls himself Woody Guthrie; he rides the rails carrying a guitar that has the real Guthrie's adage "This machine kills fascists" written on the case. Bale is Jack Rollins, the earnest, denim-shirt wearing protest singer who galvanized the folk scene in early '60s Greenwich Village. (Julianne Moore hilariously nails a Joan Baez type in the film's faux-doc on Rollins' life.) Ledger is Robbie Clark, a Brando/Dean type actor who makes his name portraying Rollins in an earnest Hollywood film. Blanchett is Jude Quinn, the wiry embodiment of the "wiry mercury sound" Dylan tried to capture with Blonde on Blonde. Gere is Billy—maybe the Kid, maybe not—making trouble while Pat Garrett tries to build a six-lane highway through his idyllic Altmanesque old West town. And Whishaw is Arthur Rimbaud, elegantly wasted dandy poet who's fielding questions from an unnamed committee.

Got that? Dylan's music is threaded throughout, and while some sections of the film come off like direct lifts from Dylan's life—particularly the Jude Quinn stuff, which draws on the period beautifully documented by D.A. Pennebaker in Don't Look Back—others are riffs drawn from a song, an idea for a song, a feeling from a song, an idea of Dylan, an idea of the life he led. The movie invites the viewer to draw correspondences to "reality," and the more of a Dylanologist you are the better you'll be able to, but at the same time I'm Not There actively resists such activity. This creates an interesting, and sometimes irritating, but consistently stimulating, um, dialectic. And only once does Haynes succumb to the condition that shall henceforth be known as Julie Taymor Disease, when a female member of Quinn's entourage smashes a pitcher over the head of a crazed bellboy and Quinn notes "Just like a woman." And yes, it's just as cringeworthy in this movie as such stuff is in Across the Universe. Generally, the depth of the film's referentiality is kind of astonishing—more so when you consider the artists covering the Dylan songs on the soundtrack (Blanchett opens her mouth, but Steve Malkmus comes out of it). I was particularly taken with a Masculin-Feminine quote which is itself a quote from Georges Perec's novel Les Choses (although I imagine it's possible that Haynes doesn't know that, as I've never found a writing that cites it).

I really need to see this film again in order to get deeper into it, but I can't help but note that, given the emotional connection that so many feel to Dylan's work, I'm Not There is awfully cerebral. A quality I've got nothing against. But there's nothing in this film as heart-stoppingly galvanic as, say, the final fifteen minutes of Scorsese's Dylan chronicle No Direction Home. Now that I've set that sentence down I wonder what it is in me that makes me complain about that. I'm Not There is that kind of movie.

Comments

[jlix]

Wow-- I was in tears practically through the whole movie-- and alot of the people I was sitting with were too! Not cerebral to me AT ALL.

[bill]

Wow. So it might actually be good. I was not expecting that. Although Jeffrey Wells's if-you-don't-like-this-you-don't-like-movies-and-are-also-probably-from-the-Midwest review actually almost makes me want to hate this movie, my love of Dylan is stronger.

[G. Kenny]

Well, Bill, Jeff's a passionate man. And Jix...There's the rub, or some version thereof. Your take is one reason I feel I have to see the movie again, maybe twice more. I admit that I was in total work mode while watching, and I suspect it could be a very different experience were I to let it just wash over me. Make no mistake, though, this is a picture that has my utmost admiration.

[The Shamus]

Not that important, but it's "thin wild mercury sound," not wiry. Interesting post. Thanks.