http://www.calendarlive.com/tv/radio/cl-ca-dylan11nov11,0,2612090.story
Todd Haynes' film is as full of clues and obscure references as some
of the singer's own songs.
[]
November 11, 2007
By Ann Powers, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
HELP! I've followed a rabbit named Todd Haynes down a fantastic
aperture, and now I'm having trouble pulling myself out. I'm talking,
of course, about "I'm Not There," the filmmaker's fantasia about Bob
Dylan. As an avowed Haynes nut (I even own an old bootleg copy of his
Barbie-filled tragedy, "The Karen Carpenter Story") and aspiring
Dylan know-it-all (I wrote the text panels for the 2004 museum
exhibit "Bob Dylan's American Journey"), I'd been waiting a long time
to see what he'd do with the Mystery Tramp.
A first viewing revealed that there's one obvious way to enjoy "I'm
Not There," which opens in L.A. on Nov. 21, and that's to chase the
references. The movie is a homage to 1960s art films, a meditation on
mediated identity, and a lovechild of pop and the avant-garde. But
it's also a game. The extraordinary detail of Haynes' re-creation and
manipulation of Saint Bob's cosmology begs for Dylan fans to connect the dots.
Though Haynes has said in interviews that he hopes Dylan freaks won't
get caught up in those bio-mythical details, I must respectfully say
that such a request is ridiculous. Only a so-called Dylanologist
could have made this film, and Haynes can't deny us the pleasure of
noting every shirt that matches one worn in a vintage film clip, and
every quote lifted from a press conference from 1965.
There's a serious side to all this allusion. "I'm Not There"
crystallizes a particular viewpoint that's dominated Dylan talk for
more than a decade. It's the Trickster take, in which the
singer-songwriter's gift for theft and chameleonic behavior is played
up so strongly that he no longer seems like an individual at all, but
a harmonica-slinging humanoid archive of American mythology.
This take on Dylan is a rich one. For one thing, it's helped revive
interest in many lost touchstones of American music and literature;
for another, it's helped Dylan avoid getting stuck in a web of baby
boomer self-love. Haynes makes the most of the Trickster take by
placing each of his six Dylanesque figures in a memory-rich landscape
that intersects and goes beyond the songwriter's own.
With this approach, Haynes also serves his own generation. At 46,
Haynes is on the cusp between the baby boom and Generation X; he was
a toddler when Dylan stood behind the Rev. Martin Luther King at the
March on Washington. For post-countercultural bohemians such as
Haynes, the idea of Dylan as "the voice of a generation" is as
questionable as the notion that history only belongs to the baby
boomers. The fluid, playful but powerful Trickster Dylan makes much
more sense. (The view that he's just a guy who struggles with his own
limitations, like any other artist, is out of fashion with everyone
-- but shows up beautifully in this film, in the segment featuring
Heath Ledger as a Dylanesque divorcé.)
This Dylan also inspired the "I'm Not There" soundtrack, which
features an indie-rock all-star team taking on the old prophet with
verve and occasional genius. Eddie Vedder sings the opening salvo, a
barrelhouse version of "All Along the Watchtower," backed by a band
that includes members of Sonic Youth and Wilco. These and the other
bastards of Dylan who appear on the soundtrack's 36 tracks take
plenty of liberties with the classics and obscurities they cover. For
former Pavement leader Stephen Malkmus, that iconoclastic spirit
actually inspires faithful imitation, while others, such as Sufjan
Stevens, reshape the songs to suit their own style.
The music heard throughout the film works another sleight of hand.
Dylan's own renditions blend in with others; Malkmus, Mason Jennings
and John Doe provide the vocals to which Cate Blanchett (as Jude
Quinn) and Christian Bale (as Jack Rollins) lip-sync. These shuffled
renditions reinforce the sense of Dylan as a transformer whose voice
emanates beyond his own body.
"I'm Not There" meditates upon artistic self-creation in the media
age, and the gap between our lived experience and the stories we tell
about it. But a Dylan nerd isn't going to ponder those big issues
upon first viewing. That fan will be too busy following the clues,
playing Haynes' scavenger hunt. Without spoiling the film's texture,
here are some nods I caught.
The dialogue: Haynes has stated that some of Jude Quinn's lines come
from actual interviews and press conferences with Dylan. A slow
afternoon and mad Google skills would undoubtedly reveal many more
than I've traced. The curious can start by reading Nat Hentoff's 1966
Playboy magazine interview. A link is active on the website of the
Village Voice, Hentoff's longtime home.
Several other quotes, including at least one uttered by Ben Whishaw
as the Rimbaudian Dylan, come from a 1965 interview Dylan did with
Nora Ephron and Susan Edmison. And one of Blanchett's more wicked
asides -- "Love and sex are things that really hang everybody up" --
is from the late Robert Shelton's 1986 insider biography "No Direction Home."
The clothes: As everyone knows by now, Blanchett's Jude Quinn
character is a Dylan clone, right down to the polka-dot shirt he wore
in 1965. But all the other Dylans have their talismans. My favorite
subtle gestures are the aviator shades Dylan rocked in during the
1970s, worn with aplomb by Heath Ledger as Robbie, and the snakeskin
boots Dylan still often sports, which we see in a flash on Jack
Rollins during his Christian period. And the whole Richard Gere
sequence isn't just a nod to Dylan's love for western wear; it looks
like outtakes from Dylan's own strange foray into cinema, 2003's
"Masked and Anonymous."
The women: Julianne Moore stands in for Joan Baez, Michelle Williams
for Edie Sedgwick and Yolanda Ross for Mary Alice Artes, the woman
who brought Bob to Jesus in the late 1970s. But most striking is
Charlotte Gainsbourg. Her graceful performance as the fictional
Claire recalls both Suze Rotolo, the New York girlfriend who led
Dylan to Rimbaud and radical politics in the early 1960s, and Sara
Lownds Dylan, who married him in 1965, bore him four children and
went through a painfully famous divorce in the Point Dume mansion
much like the one Gainsbourg wanders through in the film.
The admirers: Allen Ginsberg makes a quick appearance, played by
David Cross. The rabbinical blessing he offers Quinn -- it begins,
"Perhaps you sold out to God" -- actually comes from a 1965 account
of Ginsberg attending a Dylan concert in Berkeley, written by Ralph
Gleason and cited in historian Alice Echols' book "Shaky Ground: The
Sixties and its Aftershocks."
Also in the Quinn sequence, Black Panther Huey P. Newton is seen
exhorting his comrade Bobby Seale to listen to Dylan's "Ballad of a
Thin Man," insisting the song is really about black empowerment. That
happened too -- not in a massage parlor, as in the film, but at the
Haight-Ashbury home of Panthers lawyer Beverly Axelrod. Seale's 1970
memoir, "Seize the Time," mentions the incident.
The mythology: "I'm Not There" makes hay of two disputed moments in
Dylan's early career. In the first, a Pete Seeger doppelgänger
wielding an ax threatens to cut the power feeding Quinn's amplifiers
at a folk festival; the second involves a folkie yelling "Judas" at
the singer as he performs in London, and the crowd nearly rioting. In
truth, Seeger denies touching any weaponry when Dylan went electric
at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival; "I said, 'If I had an ax, I'd cut
the cable,' " he told Dylan biographer Howard Sounes three decades later.
And that "Judas" moment? It's audible on a widely circulated bootleg
that was finally made officially available in 1998. Although a tiny
ruckus ensues, the moment passes soon enough.
There's much more fun to be had investigating "I'm Not There," but
I'll leave that to others with big Dylan libraries and time on their
hands. Instead, I think I'll go see the movie again. I'm curious
about what it will say to me once I've made it beyond the rabbit hole.
ann.powers@latimes.com
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