The Times, They Are A-Confusing
When does innovation end and pretentiousness begin? I found myself asking this question near the start of I’m Not There, director Todd Haynes’ follow-up to Far From Heaven. The idea is interesting: Six actors who couldn’t be more different in both look and feel playing one of the most contradictory of American icons, Bob Dylan. We have Batman and the new Joker Christian Bale and Heath Ledger, Ben Whishaw from Perfume, Richard Gere, a 10-year-old black kid (the sensational Marcus Carl Franklin), and the greatest actress of our generation, Cate Blanchett. Here’s the kicker: We never hear the name Bob Dylan used with any of these six actors.
They tell Dylan’s story through his music, without any care to chronology or to the people who inspired or were inspired by Dylan, except for one great scene where the Woody Guthrie Dylan (Franklin), goes to the deathbed of the actual Woody Guthrie and sings him a song. We do get a sense of a few of the defining moments of Dylan’s life, which is explored in interesting ways, such as his transition from protest songs, his even more controversial move from the acoustic guitar to electric, and his divorce to his first wife. The film steps around his short acting career, his near-death motorcycle accident, and his time as a preacher. These events are interspersed between his six (possibly seven) incarnations, jumbled together without any sense of time or emotional chronology.
The movie is incredibly smart and does ask you to contemplate on the complexities of Dylan, but almost at the expense of seeing how childish and bane he really is. Some scenes allow you to see him from outside his mind, such as when the movie-star Dylan (Ledger) makes an ill-advised comment about women not being poets or when the “electric” Dylan (Blanchett) is confronted by a BBC journalist (Bruce Greenwood) who asks a reasonable question and gets attacked for his efforts. I am fascinated by the decisions Dylan made in his tremultuous career, but I understand the gist of his reasons. This was a man who didn’t want to be owned by any one thing, didn’t want to be pigeonholed into a stereotype. But in doing so has isolated himself from those cared about his work. But what does that say about his fans who got angry when he branched out? These are elements of the story and the movie that I loved, not to mention that great music played by both Dylan and his many admirers (The I’m Not There Soundtrack, go get it, no matter what you think of the movie).
And yet, I cannot get over the fact a lot of the film is incredibly pretentious. First and worst of these trespasses is in the fact that none of the actors playing Bob Dylan are ever called such. I know they’re meant to represent the different faces of the man, but the fact that they act as completely different people apart from each other (the Ledger version, at one point, is the actor portraying the Bale version). This takes the idea of Dylan having different faces in to the realm that he is a close cousin to Sybil. This case can also be made of the Gere Dylan, who sees himself as an old Billy the Kid. While the analogy does ring true, we have this character actually living in the Old West. But then again, the movie doesn’t even try to hide its pretentiousness in a facade of earnestness. My biggest complaint is the misuse of the music in the movie. Dylan’s music never feels apart of the movie, merely a side dish to the action going on. But then, most of his work couldn’t be put to the context of any story because they were stories of their own.
The film’s acting is very interesting considering how the film looks at Dylan. Since it neither side with or against it’s subject, there’s a void of love and hate for the man. Again, this is an interesting aspect of the film, especially in how each of the six actors look at their part of the puzzle. Bale’s part is ultimately a man confused in both the young idealist and the older preacher-man that is Dylan’s outcome, though the later man seems to accept the confusion. The Richard Gene portion of the movie is by far the most disappointing and least interesting, and his performance does nothing to alleviate this. Heath Ledger’s performance is not entirely raw or as intense as it may seem to be at the beginning, primarily because outside of being a pompous jerk, there’s not much more to him. Again, maybe that’s the point, but I’m not feeling it. And then there’s Cate Blanchett’s Dylan who is the version we most recognize. She looks most like the man and talks most like him. And yet this is another performance that she gives where the actress is much better than the part given. She plays the outraged rebel in his most explosive time and while I’m receptive to the situation, because I know that I’m only seeing a part of the persona Dylan I don’t feel that I’m seeing the whole. The only one that I found myself really getting behind was young Mr. Franklin’s version, the boy who felt compelled to sing the songs of yore, who is both too young to feel so old and too old to look so young. This is a great performance and I hope to see this young actor again someday.
But this does come back down to being a film of its maker and Todd Haynes is certainly a capable director. But I believe he has gotten lost in the woods of this extremely complex material and wasn’t able to fully pull this film off. His shots are inventive but they lack a certain kind of heart that leaves the film feeling cold and isolated. But then again, that might be intentional since Dylan’s life is full of emptiness. His film is full of genius, but at the price of creating a compelling look at a very complex man.
All in all, I love this movie and I hate it passionately. And strangely enough, I love the movie for the same reasons I hate it. This is the kind of film that I can recommend now and berate five minutes later. But I also think that’s what Bob Dylan would have wanted in a film about him. He never wanted the love given to him; he just wanted to be seen as somebody and nobody at the same time. And if you can understand that sentence, you might be able to appreciate this movie.