A Scientist at the Movies Reviews by Greg Paris

The Evaluation System Reviews by Title Reviews by Date

Reviews from Video Reviews of the Classics Personal Background

Title: I'm Not There

Date Viewed: 1/2/08

Details:

Cate Blanchett

Ben Whishaw

Christian Bale

Richard Gere

Marcus Carl Franklin

Heath Ledger

Charlotte Gainsbourg

Julianne Moore

Written & directed by: Todd Haynes

Score: -

The Review: Perhaps you had to be there -- in Bob Dylan's life, that is. Otherwise, this stochastic excuse -- err..., metaphor -- for artistic stages of development is impenetrably cryptic and nearly uninterpretable.

As a "biography" of Dylan, this film doesn't even mention his name (except in the trailing music credits), and has six separate actors apparently representing episodes or threads in a broad and iconoclastic musical life. None actually use his name in the script -- rather assuming character names that might be meaningful if you had inside knowledge -- which makes things tough going until you fall into the spirit of things (if you ever do). In rough sequence, these include Franklin as Woody Guthrie, Whishaw as Arthur Rimbaud, Ledger as Robbie Clark, Blanchett as Jude Quinn, Bale as Jack Rollins (a.k.a. Pastor John) and Gere as Billy the Kid. Really. You can't tell the players even with a scorecard -- "Twas brillig and the slithy toves" is easier to understand. 'Tis a puzzlement. If you were to see this film blind, without any knowledge of character or intent, perhaps two of these portrayals would be close enough to the icon to be recognizable as Dylan (Whishaw and especially Blanchett) -- otherwise, this would be a pointless art film.

Much is made of the observation that this is one of the first "authorized" treatments dealing with the two women in Dylan's life (Alice Fabian by Moore, and Claire by Gainsbourg). But if his life shown on screen has any verisimilitude (even though heavily filtered through cinematic metaphor), it's a wonder anyone wanted to have anything to do with him. How much of his is "shtick" and how much an accurately rendered but flawed personality, I don't know. Portrait of the artist as an ugly American.

Brief homage is paid to the now infamous performance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival when he "went electric," including the apocryphal attempt by Pete Seeger to cut the band's sound cords with an axe (but see the Wikipedia entry for a more complete description and context).

Fragmented, pieced together nonchronologically and multi-threaded to boot, surrealist, sleep-inducing, minimally informative, almost unwatchable -- I cannot recommend this unless you are already a major Dylan groupie. But the background score is excellent, since it's mostly Dylan.

(2-Jan-08)

Back to the chronological list of reviews