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Answer to Dylan still in the wind

'I'm Not There' gets tedious, but use of six actors to play enigmatic star is mostly fun

Published on Friday, Nov 16, 2007

 

On those rare occasions when I try to figure out Bob Dylan, I usually stop myself with a line from his song Brownsville Girl: ''The only thing we knew for sure about Henry Porter is that his name wasn't Henry Porter.''

At the end of the day, the only thing we know for sure about Bob Dylan is that, well, his name wasn't Henry Porter either. And that he has written a lot of incredible, if sometimes deliberately obscure, songs. (As much as people focus on Like a Rolling Stone in all its fury, let's not forget he could write a pretty fine love song. I'll Be Your Baby Tonight is a constant in my mental mp3.)

So there comes a point that Todd Haynes' new movie I'm Not There (it opens Wednesday) proves to be an exercise in futility, an attempt to understand the incomprehensible. Which is not to say that it isn't fun to watch Haynes try.

Haynes, whose previous credits include Superstar (an attempt to tell singer Karen Carpenter's story using Barbie dolls), Far From Heaven and Velvet Goldmine, tries to deconstruct Dylan — with the singer-songwriter's permission — by having six different actors play aspects of his life and character, with none of those characters actually named Bob Dylan. (Or Henry Porter.)

Woody (Marcus Carl Franklin) is a maker of his own myth, an African-American child with stories out of the life of Woody Guthrie. Arthur (Ben Whishaw) is an obscure poet torn out of Rimbaud. Jack (Christian Bale) is the social conscience, first as a folk singer and later as a minister. Jude (Cate Blanchett) is Dylan in his folk-to-rock transformation, the fictional parallel to the Dylan of the Don't Look Back documentary. Robbie (Heath Ledger) offers a reflection of Dylan as a celebrity (here transformed into a movie star) and as a married man and father. Finally comes Billy (Richard Gere), an ancient figure steeped in the old West, and so wrapped up in the American myth as much as young Woody was.

The different Dylans move in and out of the overall narrative, accompanied by his songs and covers of them. Other characters are either real ones out of Dylan's life — David Cross as the poet Allen Ginsberg — or lightly veiled fictions — Julianne Moore as a renamed Joan Baez, for one. Bruce
Greenwood is especially intriguing as Mr. Jones, who appears repeatedly as a tormentor of the Dylans.

As the style of the songs varies, so does the style of the film. The poet, Arthur, is a black-and-white presence submitting to some kind of an inquiry. In media notes for the film, Haynes says he drew on the films of Fellini for the look of Jude's segments, and Jean-Luc Godard for Robbie's.

The result is a visually splendid movie, and one that will fascinate some Dylan fans noting an image from an album cover or the sudden appearance of a tarantula, since Dylan wrote a novel named Tarantula. And some of the acting is just terrific. Blanchett's casting may have been a gimmick, but her performance is fascinating. Gere captures the world-weariness of late-in-life Dylan, while Bale has the intensity and idealism people associate with Dylan at two key points in his career. Franklin does very well at presenting utter fakery as innocent and without guile. And, were it not for Blanchett, Greenwood might have stolen the movie.

But, as even the movie admits, it's not clear that Dylan really knew himself, or his selves, anymore than both his fans and detractors would. And that's a point I'm Not There (its title taken from a Dylan song as well) could have made more efficiently than it does in about two hours and 15 minutes of screen time.

At that length, some characters take up too much time (Robbie being one) and the gimmick gets old.

That said, I'll be happy to revisit this on DVD, where the details can be lingered over, the scenes frozen — and the tiresome parts skipped past.

 

Rich Heldenfels writes about popular culture for the Beacon Journal and in a blog at http://www.ohio.com. Contact him at 330-996-3582 or rheldenfels@thebeaconjournal.com.

 

 

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