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Directed by: Todd Haynes
Written by: Todd Haynes & Oren Moverman
Grade: B

Essentially, Haynes' film is an aggregation of six different films about Bob Dylan, each adopting a distinct tone and a different actor to play the man himself; the film never actually mentions Him by name, instead offering a series of pseudonyms and aliases, including "Woody Guthrie" and "Arthur Rimbaud". Haynes takes on the role of master of the remote control, flipping between these disparate incarnations as though they're playing on all the movie channels concurrently. The substance of I'm Not There isn't in the content of any of these takes on Dylan's life and psyche, so much as it is in their assemblage, with Dylan's music (both in his own voice and in cover versions) binding them together.
The best of these sections—which otherwise include a faux-documentary with Christian Bale in the Dylan role (looking like he's bent in a fetal position even while standing up), a face-to-face interview with Ben Whishaw as Bob, and three others—is, by far, the one with Cate Blanchett (!) as ca. '65 Bob Dylan. Haynes feels most at home as a filmmaker there, stylizing the section as a blend of Pennebaker pastiche and Fellini homage. (Those thick black shades seem equal part accurate historical artifact and Mastroianni tribute.)

For all the cleverness of the film's form, the unevenness of the different sections of the film—the one with Richard Gere as a 19th century frontier recluse in a Wild West Anatevka is, for the most part, pointless—indicates not that Haynes & co-writer Oren Moverman didn't have the right idea but that maybe they weren't the ones to make it work. (In fairness, they do come up with some wonderful moments, such as when Dylan & his band, at their infamous electric appearance at Newport, symbolically turn to the audience and spray them with machine gun fire.) After all, if I'm Not There, as it is, had rather stuck with the Blanchett section of the film and dropped the rest, sorry to say that it likely would've been a better, if less interesting or notable, film. Hopefully, if anything, I'm Not There will at least inspire future filmmakers considering a biopic to try something fresh and not to rely on the same old failed conventions.
3 comments:
Nice review. You have interesting stuff here in your blog.Keep up the good work.
Thats a cool poster. Yeah, I kinda want to see this movie. I'm not really a Bob Dylan fan, but the idea of it sounds kind of cool. Good one.
So, I finally watched this last night. I have to say the Blanchett sequence got on my nerves. Too many references to Fellini and just too much Cate Blanchett. I disagree with you about the Gere sequence, I actually found them to be quite interesting. But the Heath Ledger sequences were fantastic. He and Charlotte Gainsbourg were great, and I would have much rather have seen two hours of that story. Nice tribute to Dylan, but I could have used a little more of The Band.
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