Todd Haynes (2007)
You need to be well informed about 1950s Hollywood to appreciate Todd Haynes’s Far from Heaven and, to a lesser extent, Carol. Perhaps it requires a good knowledge of the life and music of Bob Dylan to get much out of I’m Not There – an unusual biopic, in which the Dylan protagonist is portrayed by six different actors. I don’t have that knowledge but I don’t think this is my sole reason for finding I’m Not There a tiresome movie. I saw it on its original release and decided to give it, like Far from Heaven, a second try at BFI this month. I got more from Far from Heaven this time around. I’m Not There was still as up itself as in 2007.
In the Weinstein Company’s press notes for the film, Todd Haynes is quoted as follows:
‘The minute you try to grab hold of Dylan, he’s no longer where he was. … Dylan’s life of change and constant disappearances and constant transformations makes you yearn to hold him, and to nail him down. … Dylan is difficult and mysterious and evasive and frustrating, and it only makes you identify with him all the more as he skirts identity.’
This protean quality is the basis, then, for the multiple incarnations of Dylan in I’m Not There, which Haynes co-wrote with Oren Moverman. Five of the alter egos are played by Christian Bale, Richard Gere, Heath Ledger and Ben Whishaw. The other two Dylans are more intriguing – at first sight, anyway – because they’re not white men but a fourteen-year-old African-American, Marcus Carl Franklin, and Cate Blanchett. Christian Bale plays both Jack Rollins, the ‘protest singer’, and Pastor John, the Dylan who became a born-again Christian. Richard Gere’s character nods to Dylan’s role in Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973). Heath Ledger’s Robbie Clark is an actor who becomes a star playing Dylan in a screen biopic. Ben Whishaw is Arthur Rimbaud, supposedly a strong artistic influence on Dylan. Marcus Carl Franklin’s Woody is named for the similarly influential Woody Guthrie. Cate Blanchett plays Jude Quinn, the Dylan who controversially moved from acoustic to electric guitar and toured Britain in the mid-1960s.
This is a long film although, the way it’s structured, it could go on for much longer than it does. Fortunately, Todd Haynes calls it a day after 135 minutes, when the movie has come full circle: the oldest incarnation of Dylan departs the scene and the youngest, with whom the film started, reappears. This isn’t, however, a chronologically ordered narrative. At this distance in time, I’m Not There seems kin to the time-splintered Iñárritu movies of last decade – both in the basic structure and in the dependence on that structure to make things livelier (although, in this case, that’s not lively enough). None of the Dylan lives in the film is sufficient in itself even for twenty or so minutes of continuous screen time. The only one that develops is the Robbie Clark element and ‘development’ is something of a euphemism: it’s worked out as a conventional price-of-fame marital drama. (The Robbie Clark material is different too in that Charlotte Gainsbourg, as Robbie’s wife, has a significantly bigger part than any non-Dylan character in any of the other elements.) The bits of the movie that were easily comprehensible to me were also ones that stuck out as particularly crude – like the horrified reactions of Dylan’s traditional fans to his playing electric guitar at the Newport Folk Festival. (One of these fans is played by a man affecting a very terrible Scottish accent.)
Few of the performers leave much impression. I’d forgotten that Christian Bale and Richard Gere were even in the film. Marcus Carl Franklin ensures an attention-grabbing start to proceedings but is soon virtually dropped (until the very end). Heath Ledger is uneven although the layers he gives the character of Robbie Clark are, in the context of this movie, very distinctive. It’s rather pleasing that Ben Whishaw’s and Cate Blanchett’s hand movements echo each other but Whishaw is otherwise effortful. I’m Not There came pretty early in his screen career and he seems anxious in the exalted, starry company he’s keeping here. It may not have made things easier that, unlike the other principals, he’s always filmed sitting down and facing an unmoving camera. Unlike her male co-stars, Cate Blanchett makes almost too much of an impression. Her Dylan impersonation is ingenious but it holds your attention because it’s ingenious. The actress’s skill overshadows the character she’s created – to such an extent that, when the real Bob Dylan, playing a harmonica, appears briefly on news film near the end of I’m Not There, you may for a split-second think he’s doing an impression of Cate Blanchett’s Jude Quinn. (Haynes interleaves a good deal of archive film into the narrative.)
The most impressive contribution after Blanchett’s comes from Bruce Greenwood, as Keenan Jones, a British journalist who investigates Jude Quinn. There’s a good sense of Jones getting under Jude’s skin – a dream sequence revenge-of-sorts is queasily striking too. (Greenwood also plays Pat Garrett in the Billy the Kid element.) Jack Rollins’s story is told in clips from a faux-documentary about him. The interviewees include Julianne Moore as Alice Fabian, one of Rollins’s former collaborators. Moore comes across less as a talking head in a documentary than as an actress playing a talking head in a faux-documentary. Whether or not that was Todd Haynes’s sophisticated intention, I was conscious of feeling content when Moore was on screen because I understood that Alice Fabian was Joan Baez-inspired – and because I’m Not There is, to a large extent, a Bob Dylan spot-the-reference quiz. Most people in the BFI audience probably got a much higher score than me. I still detected a hint of relief in the laughter that greeted the appearance on screen of figures as easily identifiable as the Beatles and Allen Ginsberg (David Cross).
28 December 2015
