Movie Review: I'm Not There

Man in Black Coat/Playboy:You sound a bit fatalistic.

Bob Dylan/ Arthur Rimbaud: I'm not fatalistic.  Bank tellers are fatalistic; clerks are fatalistic. I'm a farmer.  Who ever heard of a fatalistic farmer?

    From an interview of Bob Dylan in Playboy Feb. 1966, and from the film I'm Not There.

Finally they've done: they've taken the most notorious pop artist of the last century, all that's he said, done, created, and stood for, and made a wildly inventive film out of it.  Here begins my review:

New Releases are a real pain in the ass, and I usually steer clear of them.  It's a Catch 22: if the movie's a stinker, than I've just wasted 4 bucks and 2 hours, and I probably won't even remember having rented it in a year or two.  On the other hand, if I enjoy the film, chances are I'll want to take a second look.  And the way my mind works, that means the videos going to pull 8 more bucks out of me from late fees.  

This is exactly what happened when I rented I'm Not There this week: I watched it and didn't really understand what I had seen.  This happened with Southland Tales too, but after rewatching that mess, I realized the little sense that could be made wasn't really worth all the pretensions/Timberlake you had to put up with.  I'm Not There is a much better movie than a Donnie Darko done dumb, and it gets better with second viewings.  I kick myself now that I missed it in theaters, because hearing Dylan blasted out of Dobey Surround Sound must be blast.

To explain the film would require an interpretative essay.  All I can say is that this isn't a boring bio like Walk the Line.  The bio formula is thrown out the window, and director Todd Haynes puts on his post-modern goggles and constructs a mystic ode to the life and songs of Bob Dylan. 

Six actors play six different incarnations of Dylan, or at least some abstract conception of the Dylan myth.  There's the folk hobo, the troubled voice of a generation, the amphetamine Judas, the symbolic/absurdist poet, the womanizer/actor, and finally, the retired gunslinger trying to adapt to a world that no longer plays by his rules.  Nothing is linear, nothing explained, but it is beautifully put together, and manages to flow beautifully.  There are wonderful, poignant moments, with such emotional intensity that I forgot the gimmicky idea of six actors playing into a single person.

"Palindromes" did something similar, but with different results.  Perhaps that's because none of the narratives in I'm Not There co-exist in the same world.  They are all separated by space, time, and understanding.  A young black boy doing by the name of Guthrie, traveling cross country on trains, playing folk songs about Unions, doesn't even seem to realize his own time.  He's an anachronism, the mysterious past that Dylan played up, so that one might have actually thought of Dylan as a boyhood Robert Johnson who sold his soul to the Devil so that he could play to his own time.  

The mantle piece of the film, which Hayne knows, is the Judas Dylan, the punk rock insanity of a Dylan forsaking his audience.  Cate Blanchett's performance redefines impersonation.  Not only does she look like the puffy haired Dylan, she sounds, walks, talks, and flirts like him.  Never before, or probably after, will I be so turned on by a woman playing a man.

Playing as it does with narrative technique, I'm Not There hits tremendous highs that abut less interesting moments.  Richard Gere's segment as a grey-haired Billy the Kid, Dylan gone the way of the buffalo I suppose, doesn't quite go anywhere, and the pastoral, early 20th century setting is strikingly discordant compared to the rest of the film.  Haynes was pushing the envelope furthest here, in an attempt to investigate Dylan as a country hero.

I can't say that this is my end all, be all judgement of the musical- yup that's what I'm calling it, because a film that uses music to such an extent can have no other name.  Not a musical in the theatrical sense, but a new genre hybrid.  I mean, the movie actually visually interprets Dylan songs like Ballad of the Thin Man. 

Who knows, maybe I won't like it in a few years, after I've seen it and heard people rave about it.  But it's certainly one of the most interesting/daring things I've seen (in ways that David Lynch's Inland Empire wasn't daring, but rather indulgent.) Not for those who do not like confusion, nor for those who dislike the insecurity of having to interpret something (there's no single meaning to the work, no moral, just a/many spirit(s).)