I’m Not There
I only write movie “reviews” when I read or hear that someone has an extremely opposing take on a movie I’ve seen. I really liked I’m Not There, so here we go.
I’m Not There, Todd Haynes 135 min
It’s easy to fall into a rut. Sometimes the rut could be a successful career complete with notoriety. A celebrity could be a successful writer, singer, and actor and each stage is just another way of selling the persona to the public. With celebrities, people are interested in hearing a story and expect either continued, predictable success or a messy downfall with or without redemption. The plot points they want are clear and easily contained in a narrative film. Bob Dylan’s career had many interesting plot points and you could call Todd Haynes out for not being able to connect the dots in I’m Not There.
Haynes chose to emphasize the different public personae of Bob Dylan by following individual, unrelated characters down predictable yet notorious paths, stopping just short of their end. The talented young runaway has a delinquent past that keeps him on the move. The shy reluctant folk star finds Jesus and leads a choir through renditions of his own compositions. The movie opens with Cate Blanchett’s Dylan gone electric character, Jude Quinn, undergoing an autopsy, probably as a result of a drug overdose. The audience is being prepared to “look inside” the mind of Bob Dylan through the lives of the characters.
Each character is interrogated by the press or at the very least asked “who are you” in front of a crowd. Ben Whishaw’s Arthur Rimbaud character never leaves his seat opposite an interrogation committee in a room filled with press. When that happened too much in Dylan’s life he said “I’m gone,” remerging with a seemingly new point of view that lead people to see him as an enigmatic genius. His real genius was never allowing a public persona to be pinned on him. That is the one unifying theme among the characters. They escape by jumping on freight trains, evading questions, and, in the case of Richard Gere’s Billy the Kid character, faking their death and then jumping on freight trains.
Movement drives the film and pushes the fractured narratives together. I didn’t know what to expect from the film in the way of structure. I am glad Todd Haynes cut the stories together rather than presenting them back to back as individual narratives that happen to fill up the space of two hours. I think each piece could stand alone stylistically and narratively. Haynes must pride himself on being clever, packing the film with enough direct lyrics and quotes from Bob Dylan to make even the biggest fan question their ability to sort through the dialogue. Even if all the verbal references flew by you, the visual settings that frame each story would be recognizable to the casual fan who caught a few seconds of No Direction Home on PBS. Haynes borders parodying No Direction Home in the scenes that follow Christian Bale’s Jack Rollins character, but it still works.
Whether or not you know or care who Bob Dylan is, I’m Not There is artistically admirable in its style and conveying a strong theme. Nobody is as one dimensional as they seem and some people struggle to keep what they choose to do and are able to do creatively at any point in their life from defining who they are.
Haynes was able to convince Dylan to let him use original songs as well as covers to score the film. Bob Dylan insists his songs aren’t literally tied to his personal beliefs or morality, but it is hard to believe him when what he produces seem to be summations of well thought over ideas. The only other plausible explanation is that his fleeting thoughts all spill out as poetry.
