MASKED AND ANONYMOUS
Directed by Larry Charles
Starring Bob Dylan, John Goodman, Jessica Lange, Luke Wilson, Jeff Bridges, and Penélope Cruz
Metro Cinema
December 19-22, 9:00pm
** (out of five)

Great art doesn’t need to declare itself as such. If you were in a gallery and a painting had a giant arrow pointing at it that read, "VERY INTELLECTUAL," how would you feel? Talked down to, most likely?

And if the painting was one of those insane montages of John Wayne, Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, and Elvis hanging out? Then you’d probably have a similar feeling to the one caused by Masked and Anonymous.

You don’t even need to see the film to know how full of itself it is. Just take a look at the press kit. It begins with a giant quote from its stupidly named main character Jack Fate (Bob Dylan) that contains mind-blowing revelations like, "Truth and beauty are in the eye of the beholder."

Before getting into the bulk of the info on the production there’s a mini-essay in its press kit by a Princeton University prof that lets you know, "The film is layered. It happens fast and you won’t get all of it the first time around." It then goes on to briefly discuss the different layers while referencing Melville ("American tradition of high allegory"), Burroughs, the Bible, vaudeville, the blues, and, of course, Dylan’s own work. In other words: good luck trying to understand this masterpiece, you stupid fucking morons.

Dylan and his co-writer/director Larry Charles (Seinfeld, Dilbert, The Tick!) try so hard to be so damn profound and all-encompassing that they suffer a creative aneurysm. The result is a star-studded pastiche of name-dropping platitudes that make a 120-minute movie seem like 120-day poetry reading/symposium on American pop-culture.

The story is set in what, by all accounts, appears to be a modern-day Latin American country ravaged by civil war and a dictatorship. According to the press kit, however, it’s actually America in all its future dystopian squalor. Dylan stars as a legendary but imprisoned folk singer who’s sprung by his hard-drinkin’ former manager Uncle Sweetheart (John Goodman) to play a corrupt benefit concert. Jeff Bridges is Tom Friend, a misanthropic journalist assigned to cover the show, who’s accompanied by his deeply religious girlfriend Pagan Lace (Penélope Cruz). Rounding out the principal cast is Jessica Lange as Sweetheart’s playfully sultry partner, Nina Veronica, and Luke Wilson as Fate’s loyal friend Bobby Cupid.

The massive supporting cast includes Mickey Rourke, Val Kilmer, Angela Bassett, Bruce Dern, Giovanni Ribisi, Chris Penn, Christian Slater, Cheech Marin, Fred Ward and Ed Harris, with each character seemingly quirkier and more profound than the next. Some are kinda fun to watch, like Rourke, Dern and Wilson, while others shamelessly overwrought, like Ribisi, Kilmer, and Goodman, who wears a powder blue tuxedo and only stops swilling Jack Daniels long enough to spout huckster philosophy.

A bigger problem is Fate, who’s the most passive (read: boring) of the bunch. Dylan’s performance is two-dimensional–laconic and skeletal–despite how badly he’s striving for the whole still-waters-run-deep thing.

He only really seems alive when he’s performing, which, luckily happens a fair bit in the film. Masked and Anonymous is one of those movies where the soundtrack (featuring Dylan, Los Lobos, Jerry Garcia, etc) is much, much better than the film.

Because the movie is so jammed packed with obviousness, after a while you start to pick out other things like how it’s so well lit you don’t even really notice it’s shot on video, how perfectly the Los Angeles locations stand-in for Latin America, or even just how wicked fat Penn and Goodman have got.

Masked and Anonymous isn’t really as meaningless as one of those dead-celebs-hanging-out-together posters, but it’s still poisoned by pretension masquerading as art house cred.