I'm Not There. (15.)
Directed by Todd Haynes
Starring Cate Blanchett, Heath Ledger, Christian Bale, Richard Gere, Ben Whishaw and Marcus Carl Franklin. 135 mins
Everybody gets the Bob Dylan they deserve. At least they do in this freewheeling, splintered portrait featuring six actors in the lead role, none of who play Dylan. Whether your Dylan is a chameleon figure of genius or the shambling hobo who emerged at the end of Live Aid to persuade everybody to go home, you will surely find his charlatan presence here, smirking contentedly from behind the protective wall of self-satisfied in-jokes and obscure references lovingly erected around his myth.
Hayden Christensen's turn as Dylan in Factory Girl is possibly this century's most risible performance in a mainstream Hollywood movie, but on this evidence its a hard role for any performer to do with any dignity. Of the six, Bale comes off the worse because he has to do the donkey work of embodying both the early protest Dylan and the later born again Christian Dylan. Blanchett fares best because she has the best part, playing the newly electric Dylan speeding around black and white swinging 60s London, antagonizing everyone she/he meets. These are the best bits in the movie – Don't Look Back remade in the style of a Hard Day's Night.
Haynes' approach is every bit as inventive and off beat as you'd expect of someone who filmed the Karen Carpenter story using a cast of Barbie dolls. My word though, it does drag on if you're not a fan. I went in hoping for a moment when the scales would fall and I'd get what the big deal was, but I'm Not There is a closed shop. It swaggers around like a deconstruction but it dutifully mythologises its hero, and on his own terms too. Dylan's life is presented as an ongoing struggle to avoid being constrained, contained, restricted or boxed in by anybody else's view or expectation of him.
It's a reasonable enough stance, not uncommon in its way. But the film ends up as a portrait of a shirker, a man who's always ducking out of his responsibilities: marriage, folk music, the protest movement. He won't even be pinned down over the meaning of the words that he's written. It's hard to admire a protagonist (the Richard Gere incarnation) who at the height of the Vietnam War and the social upheaval in America, hides away in the backwoods of Woodstock playing at being Billy the Kid. There's a reason He's Not There – it's because he's run away again.
Directed by Todd Haynes
Starring Cate Blanchett, Heath Ledger, Christian Bale, Richard Gere, Ben Whishaw and Marcus Carl Franklin. 135 mins
Everybody gets the Bob Dylan they deserve. At least they do in this freewheeling, splintered portrait featuring six actors in the lead role, none of who play Dylan. Whether your Dylan is a chameleon figure of genius or the shambling hobo who emerged at the end of Live Aid to persuade everybody to go home, you will surely find his charlatan presence here, smirking contentedly from behind the protective wall of self-satisfied in-jokes and obscure references lovingly erected around his myth.
Hayden Christensen's turn as Dylan in Factory Girl is possibly this century's most risible performance in a mainstream Hollywood movie, but on this evidence its a hard role for any performer to do with any dignity. Of the six, Bale comes off the worse because he has to do the donkey work of embodying both the early protest Dylan and the later born again Christian Dylan. Blanchett fares best because she has the best part, playing the newly electric Dylan speeding around black and white swinging 60s London, antagonizing everyone she/he meets. These are the best bits in the movie – Don't Look Back remade in the style of a Hard Day's Night.
Haynes' approach is every bit as inventive and off beat as you'd expect of someone who filmed the Karen Carpenter story using a cast of Barbie dolls. My word though, it does drag on if you're not a fan. I went in hoping for a moment when the scales would fall and I'd get what the big deal was, but I'm Not There is a closed shop. It swaggers around like a deconstruction but it dutifully mythologises its hero, and on his own terms too. Dylan's life is presented as an ongoing struggle to avoid being constrained, contained, restricted or boxed in by anybody else's view or expectation of him.
It's a reasonable enough stance, not uncommon in its way. But the film ends up as a portrait of a shirker, a man who's always ducking out of his responsibilities: marriage, folk music, the protest movement. He won't even be pinned down over the meaning of the words that he's written. It's hard to admire a protagonist (the Richard Gere incarnation) who at the height of the Vietnam War and the social upheaval in America, hides away in the backwoods of Woodstock playing at being Billy the Kid. There's a reason He's Not There – it's because he's run away again.
