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Another Side of Bob Dylan, and Another, andAnother ...
ByA. O. SCOTT
Published: November 21, 2007
http://movies.nytimes.com/2007/11/21/movies/21ther.html?pagewanted=all
From Andy Warhol to Lonelygirl15, modern media culture thrives
on the traffic in counterfeit selves. In
this world the greatest artist will also be, almost
axiomatically, the biggest fraud. And looking back over
the past 50 years or so, it is hard to find anyone with a
greater ability to synthesize authenticity to
give his serial hoaxes and impersonations the ring of revealed
and esoteric truth than Bob Dylan.
Its not just that Robert Zimmerman, a Jewish teenager growing up
in Eisenhower-era Minnesota,
borrowed a name from a Welsh poet and the singing style of an
Oklahoma Dust Bowl troubadour and
bluffed his way into the New York folk scene. That was chutzpah.
What followed was genius the
elaboration of an enigmatic, mercurial personality that seemed
entirely of its moment and at the same
time connected to a lost agrarian past. From the start, Mr.
Dylan has been singularly adept at
channeling and recombining various strands of the American
musical and literary vernacular, but he
has often seemed less like an interpreter of those traditions
than like their incarnation.
His persona has been as inclusive as Walt Whitmans and as
unsettlingly splintered as that of Herman
Melvilles Confidence Man. Vulnerable as Mr. Dylan is to
misunderstanding (I couldnt believe after
all these years/You didnt know me better than that in Idiot
Wind), he also actively solicits it(Something is happening here/But
you dont know what it is/Do you, Mr. Jones? in Ballad of a Thin
Man). So it is only fitting that Todd Haynes, in Im Not There,
his incandescent rebus of a movie
inspired by Mr. Dylans life and music, has chosen to multiply
puzzles and paradoxes rather than solve
them. Not for nothing does one of Mr. Hayness stories take place
in a town called Riddle.
Among its many achievements, Mr. Hayness film hurls a Molotov
cocktail through the facade of the
Hollywood biopic factory, exploding the literal-minded,
anti-intellectual assumptions that guide even
the most admiring cinematic explorations of artists lives.
Rather than turn out yet another dutiful,
linear chronicle of childhood trauma and grown-up substance
abuse, Mr. Haynes has produced adizzying palimpsest of images and
styles, in which his subject appears in the form of six
different
people.
Not one is named Bob Dylan (or Robert Zimmerman), though all of
them evoke actual and invented
points in the Dylan cosmos: Billy the Kid, Woody Guthrie, the
Mighty Quinn. Theyre not all musicians:
One is a poet named Arthur Rimbaud; another is a movie star.
These divergent visions of Dylan are played by two different
Australians (Heath Ledger and Cate
Blanchett); a young British actor (Ben Whishaw); a prepubescent
African-American named MarcusCarl Franklin; Richard Gere; and the
most recent Batman. Their stories collide and entwine, adding
up
to an experience that is as fascinating and inexhaustible as
listening to Blood on the Tracks or The
Basement Tapes.
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It is unusual to see a masterwork emerge from one artists
absorption with the work of another, though
Mr. Haynes came close with Far From Heaven, his 2002 homage to
the director Douglas Sirk. And
while Im Not There is immersed in Dylanology, it is more than a
document of scholarly
preoccupation or fan obsession.
Devotees of Dylan lore will find their heads swimming with
footnotes, as they track Mr. Hayness
allusions not only to Mr. Dylans own music but also to the
extensive secondary literature it hasinspired, from books by David
Hajdu and Greil Marcus to films, including D. A. Pennebakers
1967
documentary, Dont Look Back, some of which Mr. Haynes remakes
shot for shot.
But the film is anything but dry, and like Mr. Dylans best
songs, it is at once teasingly arcane and
bracingly plain-spoken. Mr. Haynes, switching styles, colors,
film stocks and editing rhythms with
unnerving ease (and with the crucial help of Jay Rabinowitz and
Edward Lachman, the editor and the
director of photography), has held his cerebral and his visceral
impulses in perfect balance. Im Not
There respects the essential question Mr. Dylans passionate
followers have always found themselves
asking What does it mean? without forgetting that the
counter-question Mr. Dylan has posed is
more challenging and, for a movie, more important: How does it
feel?
As you watch the mid-60s renegade folk singer Jude Quinn
embodied in Ms. Blanchetts hunched,
skinny frame and photographed in silvery Nouvelle Vague black
and white pinball through swinging
London, subsisting on amphetamines, Camel straights and gnomic
talk, it feels like a pop earthquake.
The 60s, man! As Mr. Ledgers character and his wife (Charlotte
Gainsbourg) meet, marry and fall
apart, it feels like the heartbreaking aftermath of a moment of
high promise and possibility. (That
would be the 70s.)
Riding the rails in 1959 with a pint-size, wisecracking hobo who
calls himself Woody Guthrie (Mr.
Franklin) and saddling up with Mr. Geres Billy the Kid in
Riddle, Mo., in the 19th century, you feel a
piercing nostalgia for a pastoral America that probably existed
only in legend. With Christian Bale,
playing a star of the Greenwich Village coffeehouse scene who
resurfaces as a Pentecostal minister in
Los Angeles years later, you experience a prickle of confusion
and morbid curiosity. As it all unfolds,
there may be other feelings too, including awe at the quality of
the performances and occasional
exasperation at Mr. Hayness sprawling, hectic virtuosity.
Still, I would not subtract a minute of this movie, or wish it
any different. Nor do I anticipate being
finished with Im Not There anytime soon, since, like
Subterranean Homesick Blues, it invites
endless interpretation, criticism and elaboration. Instead of
proposing a definitive account of Bob
Dylans career, Mr. Haynes has used that career as fuel for a
wide-ranging (and, if youll permit me,
freewheeling) historical inquiry into his own life and times. In
spite of its title, Im Not There is a
profoundly, movingly personal film, passionate in its engagement
with the mysteries of the recent past.
Live in your own time. Thats the advice young Woody Guthrie
hears from a motherly woman who
offers him a hot meal and a place to sleep. Its sensible advice
hes daydreaming of the Depression in
the middle of the space age but also useless. Its not as if
anyone has a choice. To slog through the
present requires no particular wit, vision or art. But a certain
kind of artist will comb through the old
stuff thats lying around the tall tales and questionable
memories, the yellowing photographs and
