I’M NOT THERE
Directed by Todd Haynes. Starring Cate Blanchett, Christian Bale, Richard Gere, Heath Ledger. Opens Fri, Feb 8.
4 Stars
In his memoir Chronicles: Volume One, Bob Dylan describes going to see the movie The Mighty Quinn in New Orleans during a break in the recording of his album Oh Mercy. “Years earlier I had written a song called ‘The Mighty Quinn,’” Dylan writes, “and I wondered what the movie was about. It was a mystery, suspense, Jamaican thriller with Denzel Washington as the mighty Xavier Quinn, a detective who solves crimes. Funny, that’s just the way I imagined him when I wrote the song.”
After that facetious remark, Dylan notes that Washington would go on to play Hurricane Carter, someone else he wrote a song about. “I wondered if Denzel could play Woody Guthrie,” he muses. “In my dimension of reality, he certainly could have.”
Todd Haynes’ new film I’m Not There takes place within that dimension of reality. As an opening title explains, the movie was inspired by “the music and many lives of Bob Dylan,” and it stars six actors who each play... well, not Bob Dylan, exactly, but figures representing Dylan (some more elliptically than others) at various stages of his career or, in some cases, ideas within his music. Denzel Washington is nowhere to be found in the cast list, but there is a terrific kid actor named Marcus Carl Franklin who almost steals the movie as a quick-witted, guitar-playing, train-hopping hobo who tells everyone he meets that his name is “Woody Guthrie.”
The kid behaves as if it’s still the Great Depression, even when he wanders into a perfectly ’50s suburban neighbourhood straight out of Haynes’ previous film, Far From Heaven. But the film is crammed full of these sorts of temporal dislocations: in one heart-stopping scene, Billy the Kid (Richard Gere) gazes down at a turn-of-the-century forest, whereupon the landscape briefly dissolves into a grainy ’60s-era TV newscast from Vietnam.
The filmmaking style jumps around unpredictably too: at any given moment, Haynes might give us a segment from a talking-heads documentary about a legendary Greenwich Village coffeehouse folksinger named Jack Rollins (Christian Bale); a Godardian relationship drama about an actor (Heath Ledger) who played Rollins in a hit movie; or a recreation of Don’t Look Back starring Cate Blanchett as the interviewer-baiting, frizzy-haired, electric-guitar version of Dylan (here called “Jude Quinn”), only shot in the style of Fellini’s 8
What does it all add up to? I’m not sure—but then again, I’ve never been able to pin down the meaning of any of Dylan’s greatest songs. One of the great things about Greil Marcus’ recent book-length essay about the song “Like a Rolling Stone” is the way he captures the slipperiness of Dylan—how that song can sound like a sarcastic kissoff to a haughty ex-girlfriend the first time you hear it, and then a call to action for an entire generation of young people when you go to the stereo and play it again immediately afterward. Even with six different actors playing him, I’m Not There may not be the definitive statement about Dylan, but it does an excellent job of capturing his elusiveness.
And yes, I’m aware of the paradox—but Dylan loves paradoxes too. And like a Dylan song, I’m Not There full of startling images, unexpected connections, and impish outbursts of humour. It’s self-indulgent too, like one of those Dylan songs that goes on for four or five verses after you expect it to end. You get the feeling it will reveal new meanings to you every time you watch it—and that’s enough to excuse its more cryptic moments.
Cate Blanchett has received most of the critical praise among the cast, but to be honest, I found her segments the least interesting ones in the film—I didn’t find her Dylan impression to be all that uncanny, and since I’ve seen Don’t Look Back, these scenes didn’t seem to be taking the imaginative leaps that the rest of the film was.
Instead, I really loved the much-maligned Richard Gere segments, which are set in a decaying, Felliniesque frontier town named Riddle, which we’re told celebrates Halloween every day of the year. This vein of Dylan’s art—the wandering minstrels with painted faces, the Old West-by-way-of-El Topo iconography—has always given critics problems when it shows up in movies like Renaldo and Clara or the underrated Masked and Anonymous, but to me it seems essential to his vision of America. It’s the “weird old America,” as Greil Marcus puts it, which keeps bubbling up into the culture no matter how hard the corporations and the government try to repress it.
It almost doesn’t matter that not all of it works. The originality and ambition of Haynes’ approach (and the unfailing invention of Ed Lachman’s cinematography) are more than enough to get you through the Ledger-heavy slow patches.
I wouldn’t have minded a few scenes with a crime-solving Jamaican detective, though.
