Review of I'm Not There

"I'm Not There"

by Anthony Kaufman - Curator Emeritus
Like the best Bob Dylan tunes, Todd Haynes' wonderfully puzzling "I'm Not There" is provocative pop poetry, sublime, political and complex, and swimming in a sea of allusions and slippery meanings.

But you don't have to know anything about the legendary rock musician to enjoy "I'm Not There," a reference itself to an obscure song, for years only available on bootlegs, that most people have not heard—or even heard of, frankly—until now. When it comes to Dylan, Haynes suggests, we're all a little bit in the dark: the deep recesses of his songs and secret lives will continue to remain mysterious, always in a constant state of revealing and concealing themselves.

That's not to say that knowing Dylan, or the iconography that surrounds him, won't add to the pleasures of "I'm Not There," whether in catching quotes from his songs in the dialogue, recognizing characters that stand-in for real-life liasons or celebrities or scenes that directly echo D.A. Pennebaker's landmark 1967 Dylan documentary "Don't Look Back." But the film is also a fascinating story of fame, protest and the frustrations of the individual in a failing world that should resonate for non-Dylan fans, as well.

Famously, "I'm Not There" casts six actors to represent different incarnations of the Dylan persona: There's Marcus Carl Franklin, a train-riding 11-year-old black boy and folk-and-blues guitarist who goes by the name Woody Guthrie; Christian Bale as Jack Rollins, a Greenwich Village '60s-folk-hero turned '70s-born-again-Christian; Cate Blanchett as Jude Quinn, the infamous late-'60s electric-playing provocateur; Health Ledger as Robbie Clark, a brooding, Brando-esque actor who plays Rollins in a film within the film; Richard Gere as Billy the Kid, an older Dylan living in the days of the Old West; and Ben Winshaw, as an enigmatic poet, halfway between beat and symbolist, named Arthur Rimbaud—though he emphatically states, "I'm not a poet; I'm a trapeze artist."

Indeed, the high-wire act is both Dylan's and the film's: How do you juggle so many different characters, tones, styles and stories in a single film (or life) and not end up flat on your face? The miracle of "I'm Not There" is that the pieces do fit together, adding up to, if not a biographical portrait of Dylan, a mosaic of the sentiments and viewpoints of his music and his times.    

Those times are the swinging sixties, a moment of political rage, free love and guerilla theater – all of which underline the spirit of "I'm Not There." While the Marcus Carl Franklin, Richard Gere, and Ben Winshaw "Dylans" exist in more metaphorical realms, they stand in contrast and reverberate against the more direct dramatic storylines of the Bale, Blanchett and Ledger "Dylans," which speak more directly to the era's Vietnam War backdrop. But each in their own way reflects protest and irreverence—a sense of nonconformity, and holding onto one's ideals (and the flexibility to change those ideals) in the face of outside pressures.  

For pure, visceral enjoyment, Blanchett's Jude Quinn is the most charismatically cantankerous—an anti-icon who represents a point in Dylan's career when he rejected his old-folk origins, played troublemaker with the media, and lost himself in a drug-addled haze. "Have you got a word for your fans?" says one journalist. "Astronaut," replies Quinn. Miraculously, it is Blanchett who nails Dylan the most, imbuing her scenes with quick wit, mumbling rancor and heavy-lidded insouciance.

If Blanchett's Quinn shows Dylan's struggles with fame—a hilarious run-in with David Cross' Allen Ginsburg has the two pranksters shouting to a statue of Jesus, "Why don't you do your earlier stuff?"—the story of Ledger's Robbie Clark deals with the pains of his personal life in the form of Claire (an amalgam of several women Dylan was involved with over the years, including his wife Sara Dylan, who bore him four children). Played with heartbreaking intensity by French actress Charlotte Gainsbourg, Claire gives the film an emotional center; as Vietnam collapses and climaxes, so, too, their relationship fractures and implodes.  

But quickly the film dispatches such melodramatic moments for more abstract interludes:
The Richard Gere sequences, for example, have confounded many viewers. What are we to make of this 19th Century Western landscape, as a frontier town is being demolished to make way for new industries? If the twist may be perplexing, it's still all of a part. This is a film of several stylistic trends and multifarious identities: Just as Blanchett/Quinn's black-and-white story evokes both "Don't Look Back" and Italian surrealist Federico Fellini's "8 ½" and Bale/Rollins' resembles classic documentary, the Gere section deliberately recalls the orange-brown revisionist Hollywood Westerns of the 1970s, specifically Sam Peckinpah's 1973 odyssey "Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid" (in which the real-life Dylan scored and actually appears as a character fittingly named "Alias"). While the story seems out of place with what comes before it, it's not just another important chapter in the Dylan mythology, but more essentially, offers up a portrait of a romantic idyll (or idol) on the verge of obsolescence.

Bob Dylan isn't gone yet, of course—though one of his identities does crash and die in a motorcycle accident in the film. But his shape-shifting, elusory persona—itself a form of political protest—seems like a ghost from a former time, existing in an era when our icons didn't fit neatly into a comfortable, consumerist box, or an iPod, or a Starbucks (the only place you could buy Dylan's "Live at the Gaslight 1962" CD a couple of years ago.)
 
Todd Haynes has tackled the figure of the enigmatic star before; in his 1998 film "Velvet Goldmine," the main character, a journalist played by Christian Bale, tries to get close to gender-bending glam-rock superstar Brian Slade, an obvious stand-in for David Bowie's Ziggy Stardust. Like "I'm Not There," "Velvet Goldmine" has a strong taste for counter-cultural nostalgia, and the belief among idealistic young people that they could once change the world—but have since given up.

As Ewan McGregor's Curt Wild says in "Goldmine," "we ended up just changing ourselves." "What's wrong with that?" asks Bale's journalist. "Nothing," replies Wild, "if you don't look at the world."

"I'm Not There" continues the train of thought. At some point, even Dylan, the folk-singing protest hero, turned away from the world and ended up just changing himself. But can you blame him?

 

Posted on 12/27/07 by: anthony 12:46 PM

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