You ain't him!
Jan. 2nd, 2008 09:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shewhomustIn the lull between Christmas and New Year we went to the Tyneside Cinema to see I'm Not There, Todd Haynes' fantasia on the lives and legends of Bob Dylan. Of the four of us who went together, ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
durham_rambler and I are the hardcore Dylan fans, and we enjoyed it. I was quite happy to treat it as an extended music video (very extended, admittedly: it could have lost half an hour or more, and been the better for it. But even at 135 minutes, it's shorter than Renaldo and Clara) - plenty of Dylan recordings, pretty pictures to look at, in-jokes and references to disentangle... Our companions (who accompanied us, I suspect, on the basis that a movie's a movie, a phenomenon's a phenomenon, and that a movie about a major cultural figure must have something to offer to the general viewer) were not impressed.
It's a cliché to talk of Dylan's ability to reinvent himself. The film takes this literally, casting six actors as fictionalised, if not mythologised, aspects of the legend. Of these, Cate Blanchett is extraordinary as "Jude Quinn" - the Dylan of the electric tour and of D.A. Pennebaker's Don't Look Back: Marcus Carl Franklin plays the boy Dylan claimed to have been before his career started, the littlest hobo, the runaway who idolised Woody Guthrie, the rural Black boy rather than the urban middle-class Jew; and Richard Gere walks amiably through the landscape of the Basement Tapes under the pseudonym "Billy" - briefly, I thought that this was surely Kris Kristofferson's rôle, and then realised that Kristofferson was present as narrator.
These three strongly differentiated worked well; I was less convinced by Ben Whishaw's "Arthur Rimbaud", potrait of the artist as a young dandy, given nothing to do but feed snappy quotations to an unseen interviewer. "Jack Rollins" (Christian Bale) is Dylan as believer, both at the beginning of his career, the spokesman for his generation, and in the later born-again era. If the name has any significance, I'm missing it: does it refer to the film producer, or the man who wrote Frosty the Snowman? Finally, Heath Ledger plays "Robbie Clark", an actor whose one rôle seems to have been in a film biography of Jack Rollins, and whose relationship with his wife (or girlfiend, or anyway some French girl, played by Charlotte Gainsbourg) gradually falls apart.
All in all, the film was not well served by its attempts to use narrative: the episodes which brought together music, situations, fragments of dialogue, were atmospheric, witty, entertaining; the stories imposed - particularly on these latter two characters - were clumsy, and made me more aware of the gap between Dylan's factual life story and these invented fictions. This was true throughout: there'd be a moment of admiration for how well a particular piece of archive footage had been recreated, followed by a sharp realisation that "But it wasn't like that!"
durham_rambler and I are the hardcore Dylan fans, and we enjoyed it. I was quite happy to treat it as an extended music video (very extended, admittedly: it could have lost half an hour or more, and been the better for it. But even at 135 minutes, it's shorter than Renaldo and Clara) - plenty of Dylan recordings, pretty pictures to look at, in-jokes and references to disentangle... Our companions (who accompanied us, I suspect, on the basis that a movie's a movie, a phenomenon's a phenomenon, and that a movie about a major cultural figure must have something to offer to the general viewer) were not impressed.It's a cliché to talk of Dylan's ability to reinvent himself. The film takes this literally, casting six actors as fictionalised, if not mythologised, aspects of the legend. Of these, Cate Blanchett is extraordinary as "Jude Quinn" - the Dylan of the electric tour and of D.A. Pennebaker's Don't Look Back: Marcus Carl Franklin plays the boy Dylan claimed to have been before his career started, the littlest hobo, the runaway who idolised Woody Guthrie, the rural Black boy rather than the urban middle-class Jew; and Richard Gere walks amiably through the landscape of the Basement Tapes under the pseudonym "Billy" - briefly, I thought that this was surely Kris Kristofferson's rôle, and then realised that Kristofferson was present as narrator.
These three strongly differentiated worked well; I was less convinced by Ben Whishaw's "Arthur Rimbaud", potrait of the artist as a young dandy, given nothing to do but feed snappy quotations to an unseen interviewer. "Jack Rollins" (Christian Bale) is Dylan as believer, both at the beginning of his career, the spokesman for his generation, and in the later born-again era. If the name has any significance, I'm missing it: does it refer to the film producer, or the man who wrote Frosty the Snowman? Finally, Heath Ledger plays "Robbie Clark", an actor whose one rôle seems to have been in a film biography of Jack Rollins, and whose relationship with his wife (or girlfiend, or anyway some French girl, played by Charlotte Gainsbourg) gradually falls apart.
All in all, the film was not well served by its attempts to use narrative: the episodes which brought together music, situations, fragments of dialogue, were atmospheric, witty, entertaining; the stories imposed - particularly on these latter two characters - were clumsy, and made me more aware of the gap between Dylan's factual life story and these invented fictions. This was true throughout: there'd be a moment of admiration for how well a particular piece of archive footage had been recreated, followed by a sharp realisation that "But it wasn't like that!"
