The Dylan Film: I’m Not There
The Dylan film is spectacular. The most exciting american film in years.
Something to see and be thinking about for years.
Must be seen in a theater — the flow of music and people is joyous.
More balanced — as it looks, in its oblique way, into Dylan’s broken relationships with early fans and his first wife — than I’d expected from one or two reviews.
Indeed, one or two reviews had saddled me with worries, going in.
All worries dashed. The energy and courage laid down to make the film have paid off in spades.
Directed by Todd Haynes. Written by same and Oren Moverman. Shot by Edward Lachman. Edited by Jay Rabinowitz.
Interesting reviews online: J Hoberman at the Village Voice. John Anderson at Newsday. By Pete Travers in Rolling Stone. At Not Coming to a Theater Near You. Film Comment. And by writer Robert Sullivan in the NY Times. AO Scott is also in the Times, and applauds, but the Sullivan piece is much richer; he spent six months on it, visiting sets, the editing room, etc.
The reviewers who frowned are in a distinct minority, but include Anthony Lane in The New Yorker — who offers two basic complaints: the film is disjointed and at times confusing, and is insufficiently about the man in his world, and thus allows the “elusive Dylan, once again, to slip away.”
Although I seem to share many of Mr Lane’s thoughts about Dylan, his displeasure with the film seems a bit wooden-headed. To begin, I was never importantly confused. Jonathan Demme (I think it was) seemed right to observe that 30 seconds of confusion in a film are fine but five seconds of boredom intolerable.
What does seem true — to give Lane his due — is that the film is tightly focused on a familiar leitmotif — Dylan’s inability to live in the skin his fame wrapped about him — and thus does not fully treat much else that Dylan fans may be desperately seeking to explore and perhaps grasp.
Beneath this seeking sentiment lies, I suspect, long and commonly held disappointments in the way Dylan piloted himself through stretches of his career. Those of us who suffer with these petty resentments yearn, always, for a triumphant Apologia — a conclusive public Defense — that somehow removes from the hero’s shoe the doo and spent bubblegum he stepped in along the way.
The same desire takes shape with every reading of Hamlet. Yet the promising, brilliant prince’s trajectory always falls and fails to find redemption, or even satisfactory explanation.
Nevertheless, for good reasons, he remains one’s hero.
Mr Haynes clearly set out NOT to make a grand Apology, but rather to present the appearances at play. And this seems the essence of Mr Lane’s complaint — that the filmmaker’s vision fell short for failing to grapple with the heart of the matter.
Two reactions to this complaint:
(i) It’s a question if the grand Apology can, in any form, be mustered. We had a good shot at it a few years ago in No Direction Home, Martin Scorcese’s great documentary. Dylan spoke there at length — interesting, and moving, but confusing as ever — and around the same time had published a collection of scattered remembrances entitled Chronicles. Both doc and book, while gratefully received here, were shot through with contradiction on the familiar ticklish points re desire (to be a poet and a pop star) and responsibility (to other people).
One doubts, then, that Dylan himself has a coherent grasp of the elusive heart of the matter — which leaves Mr Haynes seeming wise, seeming to have taken the best available road, by sticking with the appearances and giving them room to exuberantly play. What Mr Lane desires (on behalf of many, no doubt) may be impossible, in any form, and almost certainly, if embraced as motive of a feature film, would lead to a treacly false artifact. Whereas I’m Not There bleeds truth, such as we have it about Bob, from every frame.
(ii) My sense, reading Mr Lane’s complaint that the history in the film is “paper thin”, is that — in his pique at finding Hamlet again tumbling toward the swordplay — he failed to notice that I’m Not There does indeed deliver the music and its world in their rich mindblowingness, even as the director/writer pursues his relatively narrow interests, and even as he allows his Dylanesque voices free range in declaring they were never a “folksinger” and that “politics” do not exist. The film brings the early music in its time to life, reigniting one’s imagination re same, and this is perhaps its prime raison d’etre, and the reason it will rocket about the world, as Pulp Fiction did a few years back, but with incomparably more staying power. It will stay as long as the Scorcese and Pennebaker documentaries do, and for much the same reasons. As long as people remain curious about Dylan and the interesting times he shared and shaped.
