I'm Not There

[bix171]

Points for trying. Todd Haynes' "I'm Not There" is not what most (myself included) might have expected, a Bob Dylan biopic. Instead, the life and music of Bob Dylan are a jumping-off point for ruminations on...the life and music of Bob Dylan. It's a collage of images, dreamscapes and ideas imagined as if Dylan himself might be in charge of his story, told in an aggressive, non-chronological format that consistently tries to confound and frustrate the viewer (none of the characters are named Bob Dylan and not all of them are singers--one's an actor) while trying to get at the essence of what has become an unknowable artist. The problem is that virtually none of the images are original: they're culled from the source and the various materials he's provided--his songs (obviously), documentaries (primarily "Don't Look Back" and No Direction Home"), literature (volume one of his autobiography, "Chronicles) and even album covers (the Richard Gere sequence invokes the cover of "The Basement Tapes")--and some of that material is far more straightforward than Haynes and his co-scenarist, Oren Moverman, try to be. The conceit of the writers imagining themselves to be working within the mind of Dylan is a little astounding--Dylan is so far above over the heads of us mere mortals (one can make a case that he's on a par with the likes of Einstein and Beethoven, certainly Joyce, Yeats and Shelley) that it's chutzpah even to attempt it. Like some of Dylan's music itself, some of "I'm Not There" is atrocious (the afore-mentioned Ricahard Gere sequence and a section involving Marcus Carl Franklin, an eleven year old African-American, as a traveling hobo named Woody) and some of it's brilliant (the "Don't Look Back" riff starring Cate Blanchett, whose channeling of a Dylan discovering the electric guitar is spot-on) and Haynes and Moverman do seem to get Dylan's point (as discussed in "Chronicles") that he saw himself as a canvas for "society" to project their interpretations of his art but was constantly forced to defend himself against "society" telling him that he was supposed to be what "society" told him they thought he was. The film, though, is so dependent on Dylan for its' muse that it has no energy of it its own; it goes on far too long and every time you think it's over it manages to lurch on and on. If you know nothing about Bob Dylan, this is not the place to start; if you're looking for fresh insight into Bob Dylan, this is merely redundant.

[Chris Knipp]

I don't quite agree with you, though it's certainly true that the film gets more points for daring and ambition than for achievement. I still think it's one of the significant American films of the year. Agree the Gere section is weak. It seems a bit obvious to say Blanchett is 'spot on'--her mimicry is obvious, even if it's brilliant in spots; it's not the more original aspect of Haynes' conception. Others also question Marcus Carl Franklin's presence, but I find that hard to understand, since he's such a great performer. His segment is one that most obviously sings, I think.

Again i will reprint my NYFF review now that the movie is in general release--with a few alterations, below:

TODD HAYNES: I'M NOT THERE

A film biography that's complex, like its subject

Review by Chris Knipp

Haynes’ adventurous biopic of Bob Dylan, which uses six actors of both sexes and several races ranging in ages from 11 to 50, is both exhausting and fun to watch. It’s also hard to describe. But let’s start with those six and the characters or facets they portray. Arthur (Ben Whishaw) is the Dylan who incarnated the radical, "accursed" French poet Arthur Rimbaud and serves as a kind of narrator whom we see smoking and giving ironic, provocative answers--as the young Dylan so often did-- to some kind of inquisition sporadically throughout the film. Woody (the wonderful young Marcus Carl Franklin, an amazing a singer and actor) is a precocious rail-hopper with a guitar (labeled like the real Woody’s, THIS MACHINE KILLS FASCISTS) and tall tales that start with his claim that he’s Woody Guthrie. Woody’s scenes show him rescued by a black family and a white family and performing with country black musicals. He represents the early shape-shifting Dylan in search of an identity and telling a lot of lies along the way.

Jack (Christian Bale) is the Dylan who became a hit in Greenwich Village and went into the South and sang “The Ballad of Hattie Carroll” and other protest “folk songs,”—the high-profile “political” Dylan who spearheaded a movement and became famous with his brilliant early LP’s. But Jack doesn’t want to be typecast and “betrays” his adoring public and his lover and folksinging champion Alice (Julianne Moore), a Joan Baez stand-in seen here through the format of later “interviews." (The movie shifts formats as it shifts actors.)

Jack disappears and his place is taken by Robbie (Heath Ledger), a young actor in New York who becomes famous for starring in a 1965 film depicting the vanished Jack. Robbie meets Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg) in a Village coffee shop and falls in love, and a turbulent ten-year marriage follows, winding up painfully at the time of the Vietnam War’s end. This is the personal, marital side of the artist rather than the performing, creating side.

If Jack represents the cast-off early style and Robbie represents Dylan’s family life, Jude (Cate Blanchett) is Dylan the artist, quintessentially as seen in the mid-to-late Sixties when he toured England (an event notably chronicled by two Leacock-Pennebaker documentaries)—and shocked his audiences, some of whose members felt betrayed and shouted “Judas!”, when he shifted from solo guitar and harmonica to more personal songs with loud rock accompaniment. Jude’s segments are partly borrowed from Pennebaker, but largely consist of gorgeous black and white scenes deliberately and “churlishly” (Haynes’ word) imitative of Fellini’s 8 ½.

Jude’s new style is admired by Allen Ginsberg (David Cross) and underground groupie Coco Rivington (Michelle Williams, Ledger’s real-life wife) and he becomes internationally famous. But he continues to be misunderstood by the protest-music old guard and conventional journalists like the British TV host Mr. Jones (Bruce Greenwood)—who’s incorporated into a music video for Highway 61 Revisited’s "Ballad of a Thin Man":

. . .something is happening here
And you don’t know what it is, do you, Mister Jones. . .

Jude and Arthur articulate the early Dylan’s challenging, ironic stance to the public, but Jude is exhausted on tour and his nihilism leads him to an existential crisis.

He’s reborn symbolically in Pastor John (Christian Bale again), who’s moved to Stockton twenty years later and become a born-again preacher, singing his own gospel songs. Finally the last version of Dylan appears in Billy (Richard Gere), in full retreat from the world—till threats to destroy his town of Riddle cause him to enter public life again. This sequence evokes a Sixties historical western in which Pat Garrett (Bruce Greenwood) is a character.

This is only the barest outline of the two-and-a-quarter-hour film, in which various “Dylan’s” are woven in and out. Maybe the reason why I found Woody’s sequences delightful and Billy’s colorful but wearying has to do with the latter’s coming two hours later. But Gere and his sequences evoke Dylan less well and are puzzling to interpret. Blanchett’s in contrast are, of course, the most conventionally straightforward. She’s the only one who directly mimics the physical appearance and the speaking voice of the artist (unless Whishaw does a better job with the voice).

Blanchett’s impersonation works as a contrasting element in the film, but it’s also a contradiction, because the whole idea of the mulitple actors seemed to be to avoid the conventional mimicry of more conventional American musical biopics like Ray or Ali or Walk the Line. If such stuff is unworthy of the protean Bob Dylan, is a female actor’s copycat game really more hip? Evidently Haynes thought so; the use of a woman to play the young, wooly-top genious during his rise to fame was planned by Haynes in his screenplay before he even chose Blanchett.

The method Haynes has chosen does unquestionalbly avoid cliché, and it may simply baffle some conventional viewers. Even if this is still a biopic, it is a sophisticated one. And the fractured portrait is well justified by the nature of its subject. Dylan, like such other great modern artists as Picasso or Miles Davis, has always been a shape-shifter, tearing up styles and looks and sounds as he went forward. Some of his permutations were left out of this movie, such as the period of the orthodox Jew and JDL supporter. But it’s intelligent to see Dylan the man, the husband, the artist, the political being, and the religious follower as completely separate entities, because no simple biopic sequence can really dramatize the complexity of such an artist and such a protean existence. Haynes’ film makes you think about biography itself, as well as giving imaginative shape to aspects of Bob Dylan no non-fiction account can really provide.

You have to get your head around the fact that there’s an experimental methodology at work in I’m Not There. Maybe that’s the reason Dylan himself, approached via his eldest son Jesse, agreed with his long-time manager Jeff Rosen to grant Haynes both the musical rights and the biographical rights. Haynes has chosen a multifaceted and original way of using Dylan’s songs. Only Franklin actually performs them with his own voice. Otherwise the soundtrack mixes original Dylan recordings with existing covers, new ones by people as widely various as Ritche Havens, Iggy Pop, John Doe and Sonic Youth, and other music, including, appropriately for the 8 ½-esque sequences, Nino Rota. There is a voiceover narration by Kris Kristofferson. Haynes worked on the screenplay for years, and then collaborated with Oren Moverman.

Interviews have shown that whatever missteps he’s been guilty of in th past (and a Velvet Goldmine is certainly one of those) director Haynes is an intelligent and articulate man who knows his Dylan inside and out. This is one of the most adventurous American movies of the year, and it concerns one of our most fascinating artists. Those who want a more literal chronicle of the man can go to Martin Scorsse’s fine 2005 documentary No Direction Home, or the collection of early Dylan festival footage that is now coming out through IFC First Take.

[oscar jubis]

I plan to post a review of the film as soon as time permits. After first viewing I feel confident about my grasp of the content. I plan to watch it again soon because I enjoyed it tremendously and because I'd like to focus my attention a bit more on the structure, editing and other purely formal aspects. But I hope I can write a review before I return to the theater.

Presently, I'd like to say I find it difficult to break down the film in terms of segments (For example, Marcus Carl Francis' segment or "Richard Gere sequence") in that these performances" are not discrete. They alternate and "bleed" onto each other. I'm still pondering my approach, to be honest. Certainly one needs to discuss the function of each of the not-quite-Dylans in the overall conception. Perhaps one needs to resort to the use of "segment" or "sequence" for practical purposes, no matter how the terms simplify and reduce the function the performances serve.

[Johann]

Looking forward to this one.

The thing about Dylan is that he's got such an enigmatic persona that films like this can be made. The idea isn't that ridiculous when you consider Bob the man. He's got all these dimensions and intelligence, so "offbeat" creative ideas like I'm Not There can be attempted.

I'm very interested in how the filmmakers pulled off the "sides" or "versions" of him.

[mouton]

Haven't had a chance to read through the rest of the posts but I'll come back tomorrow ... in the meantime ...

I’M NOT THERE
Written by Todd Haynes and Oren Moverman
Directed by Todd Haynes

Interviewer: Mr. Quinn, have you got a word for your fans?
Mr. Quinn: Astronaut.

In true tribute style, I’M NOT THERE opens with the sounds of adoring fans waiting for their favorite folk-rock star to grace the stage. The camera maneuvers in first person point of view through the winding corridors leading from the dressing room to the stage. This build toward the reveal is one we’ve all seen before but this is perhaps the most traditional thirty seconds of the entire film. It isn’t long before the cheers are interrupted by the roar of a motorcycle and a man on a bike driving across a deserted dirt road. The shot is ultra wide and the sky is that deep grey only black and white film can provide. Writer/Director, Todd Haynes inadvertently announces, in the mere seconds it takes the shadowy biker to cross from one end of the screen to the other, that what we are about to watch will be anything but traditional, aesthetically breathtaking and an experience unlike any other. Blinking boldly on and off in the middle of the sky are the words of the title – one by one they appear out of sequence until they settle for a moment in order and all at once, before flickering away yet again. I’M NOT THERE is inspired by the many lives of Bob Dylan but he is somehow nowhere to be found in the two hours that follow and yet still everywhere at the same time.

I’M NOT THERE is entirely and unapologetically experimental. Six different actors (Christian Bale, Cate Blanchett, Marcus Carl Franklin, Richard Gere, Heath Ledger and Ben Wishaw) play six different characters that represent human incarnations of Dylan from various periods of his existence or from inspired interpretations of where his life could have gone. No one story is told from beginning to end nor overtly connected to any of the surrounding stories. Each is told with a different visual motif, from smooth to grain, from subdued black and white to brilliantly expressive color, from cinema verité to abstract imagery that leaves you lost and puzzled. The entire undertaking can be daunting and overwhelming if you aren’t prepared. Even if you go in armed with sharpened knives ready to dissect the onslaught of non-linear imagery, it will come at you so fast, your knives will be dulled before you can make the first cut. While it certainly helps to be a fountain of Dylan knowledge, it won’t hurt if all you can do is maybe hum along to “Blowin’ in the Wind” on a good day because Haynes is not concerned with telling a direct account of Dylan’s story. Rather, he is paying homage to what his life and how he lived it inspired both passion and rage in millions.

What saves I’M NOT THERE from being overbearing, pompous and pretentious is intention. Haynes had been a Dylan fan in his high school years but only recently rekindled his love for the artist. His decision to cast and shoot without boundaries was meant to embody the same spirit and freedom of the man whose life story he was telling. His unfettered approach does at times come off as film student idealism (with expert technique, mind you) but his innovative and open-minded choices ultimately win out as inspired. His decisions are not only experimental but also successful. There is never a moment that Haynes’s love for Dylan is in question. In fact, his love is so potent that, just like the real love experienced in intimate relationships, it clouds his vision. Haynes’s Dylan is put upon and criticized to the point of hiding and recluse but his attackers (members of the press or fans who have turned on him) are always portrayed as people disappointed that he is not what they want him to be or need him to be. People needed Dylan to bring them peace but all he could claim was that you couldn’t change the world with a song, that all he could sing was what was inside of him. In that regard, he never stopped singing about the truth.

The truth behind I’M NOT THERE is that it is best enjoyed if you don’t try to define it. If you allow it to be what it is, to let it go where it must in order to be complete, then its secrets will inevitably reveal themselves when they are meant to be seen and understood. I don’t pretend to say I understand the film in its entirety. I have theories about what is being said and how it needs to be said in a certain fashion but I can’t claim that any of them are accurate. For me, both Todd Haynes and Bob Dylan are poets and this film is but a love poem from one man to the other.

www.blacksheepreviews.com

[Chris Knipp]

Dylan seems to be looking ever more iconic these days, so Haynes' film celebration seems extremely well-timed. I'm looking for the film (a re-issue) that was a sidebar at the NYFF I had to miss:
The Other Side of the Mirror: Bob Dylan Live at the Newport Folk Festival, 1963-65
Series: The 45th New York Film Festival [Sep 28 - Oct 14 2007]
Director: Murray Lerner, Country: USA, Release: 2007, Runtime: 80

Filmmaker Murray Lerner captured the spirit of the era at the Newport Folk Festival, as well as the extraordinary music produced on its stage, in his woefully neglected Festival. Now Lerner has gone back to his Newport footage and crafted a revealing portrait of the young Bob Dylan during the crucial period of 1963-65, as he grows progressively darker and more withdrawn and he and his band take their first steps toward rock and roll. The film features stirring versions of some of his most famous songs, including some legendary duets with Joan Baez. A great document This is on DVD in perhaps slightly different form, and maybe you can rent it, but I haven't seen it. Anyway it's being reissued by IFC, is my understanding, and it will be nice to see it in theaters some time soon right in the wake of, first, NO DIRECTION HOME, and now I'M NOT THERE. There was also the Morgan Library exhibition of a rich collection of Dylan memorabilia and records early this year, and one can always re-watch Leacock-Pennebaker's equally iconic DON'T LOOK BACK.

http://www.filmlinc.com/nyff/program/special/theothersideofthemirror.html

[Chris Knipp]

Kent Jones's NATION (http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1686684,00.html) piece and Rosenbaum's CHICAGO READER "Funny Kind of Tribute" review (http://www.chicagoreader.com/features/stories/moviereviews/2007/071122/) stressing the critical side of Haynes's Dylan portrait both throw around the words "pastiche" and "semiotic" a lot, and the self-styled "Bob Dyland Alter Ego" (http://bobdylanalterego.blogspot.com/) posted a long blog comment on Rosenbaum and the movie debunking both, which Rosenbaum praised. Alter Ego has some excellent points. Number one, perhaps: that the only reason anybody cares about the boy from Hibbing is the music. If it wasn't for that, nothing else would have a jot of importance, and all these highfalutin discussions and Haynes' movie tend to overlook that fundamental truth. Still, I'll stick by idea that Dylan is the man of the hour and never has seened more iconic than now. An icon means a lot of different things in different contexts and the Hanyes movie is about that.

[Johann]

This is a mighty contender for best film of the year.

Dazzling editing.
Genius songs.
Thought-provoking ideas.
Powerful, stark black and white photography, grainy verite style, everything is tried here, and it wonderfully evokes the eras that the enigma that is Bob Dylan roamed around in, out of time, out of place, out of space, the guy himself didn't know who he was.

Mr. Haynes has pulled off something of a miracle here.
To film a biography of a subject so chimerical, so mysterious, so damn hard to pin down is a feat of significant achievement.
I was often in awe and in rapt wonder over how this filmmaker managed to weave such a compelling narrative with such varied and juxtaposed elements: the actors, the costumes, hairstyles, times, locations, the philosophies, the attempts of Dylan to strip away fame like a bullfighter strips the cape away from the bull.

He's in defiance of cages, of all concepts of "normal" and "what is so". He is anti-Christ, anti-society, anti-earth, anti-women, anti-social, anti-entertainer, anti-man. Anti-human.

Bob Dylan is such a bottomless well of deepness that I don't even really know where to place his real importance.

I'm saying this film is the most mind-poking movie I've seen in a hell of a long time, and it felt like an Oliver Stone vehicle- it has that Thor's-Hammer Punch that Stone has.

Everyone is raving about Cate Blanchett's "Jude Quinn", and I'm one of them. But it's Christain Bale who blew my head off.
He's just absolutely amazing as "Jack Rollins". Absolutely astounding, what he does here. And the heavy heavy poignancy of Heath Ledger as the actor, "Where no one knows my name", is hard to describe in words. He had a real screen face, Ledger. Man, 2008 has a giant talent loss. At least to see him in another film with Christian Bale is enough to ask for.
He's incredible in I'm Not There, one of countless reasons why this film resonates with the soul.

The cinematography was stellar. Beautiful pictures and set designs. And the contexts of the songs and they way they're delivered...Bravo Mr. Haynes. Classic Masterpiece is what you've made, Dear Sir.

I was thinking to myself that Bob himself would even have to admit that Haynes knows his life story.
The motorcycle accident, the "Basement Tapes" invocations with Gere, the Cate Blanchett mimickry, Allen Ginsberg, Rimbaud, even Emily Dickenson is mentioned-Haynes knows his Bob Dylan, folks.
I was just loving this film the whole time it unfurled before my eyes.

Brillliant work Todd Haynes.

[Chris Knipp]

Glad you liked it so much. Your enthusiasm revives mine. It didn't get as huge a critical reception as it might have. J. Hoberman called it the movie of the year, though. Now he is heralding Gus Van Sant's Paranoid Park with the same enthusiasm ("Paranoid Park Returns Gus Van Sant to his Roots")--will you want to see that? Is Van Sant your cup of tea?

[Johann]

Man, this film blew. me. away.

It's difficult to express in words just what exactly Mr. Haynes has achieved here. This film deserved a LOT more oscar attention.
He's taken the various "phases" of Dylan's career and not just honored the history of the man, but added a very interesting dimension to it, by daring to have people (actors) play an enigma, a non-person, someone who's shouting at all times: I'm Not There!

I love that line in the film which I don't remember verbatim but goes something like: "Never create anything, because it will follow you forever", like an albatross..

There are a gazillion edits here, and it is so well put together that I feel the editor deserves an Oscar. Brilliance in editing.

I also loved it when Cate Blanchet puts the microphone through the prison bars to that guy who just. Didn't. Get it.

There's so much to ponder with this one, so many alleys and cul de sacs of thought and consideration. A true labrynth of art.
And to see a Legend, Mr. Richie Havens, sing and play a Bob tune here was awesome (he was the opening act at Woodstock and he's playing here April 24th- I bought my ticket. $42 to see a full-blown Living Legend).

All in all, I'm just supremely impressed with what I saw in this movie. You have to be listening to understand the enigma.
Bob was and probably still is just like what Peter Ustinov said of Bogart:

He was a Buccaneer, his spirit knocking at Doors unknown even to him...