I'm Not There (2007)

Everywhere And Nowhere...

I have been a fan of Dylan for 40 years and while it is interesting to see some key moments of his biography reenacted...Newport switching from folf to rock, The UK Royal Albert Hall incident, visiting Guthrie in the hospital, truth be told the actors depicting the different sides/personalities were irritating, screeching,egoistic,childish and had nothing to do with this mercurial, enigmatic icon, The REAL Dylan is best captured in Scorsese's " No Direction Home" and "Don't Look Back" another good one.

The Cowboy Junkies did a song "Cheap is How I Feel" and that is why this movie disappoints.. calling Dylan Edelstein, his roving with Ginsburg, his vomiting, come on....taking well known aspects of the picture and highlighting them for consumerism is not the real Dylan in my minds eye.Dylan is complicated stuff and this movie sure isn't despite the occasional wisdom lines.
Seeing a young conning hustling Black Dylan, a spaced out mercurial Dylan, An old drifter, recluse etc. is one mans image of Dylan..the pictures that come to my mind is very different..I don't think the portrayal can be captured effectively and one is left with a jumble..Yes, the best line in the movie is at the end "living with past,present future,
in the same room" and that is why I'm Not There is neither here or there and to quote from an album title "Time Out Of Mind"..his later life neglected in the movie.

Where is Dylan the mystic?? The man standing in Jerusalem not as a convert to Christianity BUT as a man grappling with his contradictions?
Where is Johnny Cash, the Gypsy Dylan of Rolling Thunder despite the paint mask of "Going To Acapulco", somehow I feel all these juxtapositions were not handled correctly despite the idea that the movie captures an elusive character that was probably the intention at the outset..too much was left out and to think that you can classify and break down a complex personality into periods or different personalities is where the movie fails despite it's cuteness on making the film a creation for the mass market and youth who are better served going back and listening to The Basement Tapes, Blonde On Blonde, New Morning on their own..
I highly doubt Dylan approved of this movie although it is cute seeing The Tarantula image and is entertaining despite some of the annoying actors portraying Bob..but again Dylan as some crazed marriage breaker of 2 daughters..the facts make it appear that the movie is almost a total fiction to the man himself.
Entertaining but I think it is better to see Scorsese and draw your own images by listening to his music on your own. July 3, 2008

I've been there...from the beginning. C.C.TX

This movie so totally suks. You have to remember that no ONE knows Dylan like himself. Don't believe what every nickle and dime punk, that comes along and tries to make a name for himself by offering us some doped up information on (propably) the greatest musician that was ever born. The only thing the director does here is throw more chaos into the already chaotic world of information on Bob Dylan. Leave me alone, is all he wanted. But the press hounded him, trying to make him something he didn't want to be. Like the Pharisees and the Sadducees did to Jesus in his days. I've been listening to Dylan since the beginning. He has penned some of the greatest lyrics that have ever been written. And there are many who tried to make them say something it didn't. To them I say, "Just listen to the words and the music, SHUT UP and listen". Awesome! One star for songs by the original artist, Bob Dylan.










June 30, 2008

Surprisingly Good!

As a long time Dylan fan I wasn't expecting to like this film from the snippets I'd seen on You Tube and TV. I wasn't even going to buy it but I gave in to curiosity and was pleasantly surprised. I enjoyed the music and had fun trying to solve the puzzles of ... Why is Woody an African American Boy? Which phase is Gere supposed to represent? Who is the woman/women ... Suze? Joan? Edie? Sara? Which incarnation does this or that actor represent? All in all it was fun and I'll watch it again ... and again to see if I can decipher more. Cate Blanchett did a good job with the speech inflections and mannerisms of the DON'T LOOK BACK Dylan. Sadly, I do think the movie still left Dylan trapped as "the voice of a generation" ... still trapped in the 60's. Too bad because there is such richness in all phases of his long career. Even though other phases of his career are portrayed, it's the Blanchette Dylan you take home with you. I believe Liam Clancy called Dylan "a shape changer". And he certaintly is! I'm hoping to be around for the next "new Dylan" when he sheds off another layer of skin. Maybe someone will make another movie ala NO DIRECTION HOME about this mysterious, marvelous, enigma. I hope so. June 25, 2008

For hard-core Dylan fans

A very good movie for hard core Dylan fans. For viewers who are not well versed in Dylan folklore, it would be hard to decipher. June 24, 2008

Both fascinating and a tad dull at the same time

Before delving into the vices and virtues of this film, I have to pause to say how astonishing Cate Blanchett was in this film. Though Todd Haynes famously used multiple actors to portray versions of Bob Dylan, Cate Blanchett's performance was hands down the most impressive of the bunch. If you have seen DON'T LOOK NOW -- D.A. Pennebaker's documentary of Dylan on tour in 1975 -- or Scorsese's BOB DYLAN: NO DIRECTION HOME, which featured extensive excerpts of color footage that Pennebaker took but didn't use in that earlier film, Blanchett's performance is bone chillingly accurate. The Dylan in those documentaries makes you nervous and ill at ease, just as Blanchett does. What was especially impressive was how completely she nailed Dylan's voice. An Australian woman in her late thirties would not be someone you would anticipate doing a dead on Dylan impersonation, but there you have it. Often when men try to sound like women or women like men, they merely raise or lower the pitch of their voice. Blanchett, who normally has a deep, rich voice, seems somehow to take her voice down very low, and then raise it up as if straining to speak as high as she does. The result is very much like the Dylan from DON'T LOOK BACK, who strains to speak in a high pitch. And if you've heard the soundtrack where someone in concert calls Dylan "Judas" you'll know that she seems to be channeling Dylan when she replies into the mike, "I don't believe you."

Cate Blanchett is one of three great things in the movie. The other is the music of Bob Dylan featured throughout. One of the Beatles -- I forget which one -- upon being asked if the Beatles would be listened to in 500 years, replied that he thought only Bob Dylan from this generation would still be listened to at that time. I think that is correct. There is just a staggering amount of it, much of it on a level of creativity and brilliance that no one else can touch. So any movie with lots of Dylan's music -- much of it performed by himself as background music, much of it in the form of covers -- is a better movie as a result. The third great thing in the movie is the look of it. I'm not sure he is capable of making a film that wasn't riveting to look at. VELVET GOLDMINE and FAR FROM HEAVEN were both exquisite to look at, and I'M NOT THERE follows form.

Unfortunately, there were long stretches of this very long movie that were unrelentingly dull. Haynes tries to resolve the many contradictions in Dylan's persona by breaking these out and having various aspects played by different actors. As mentioned, Cate Blanchett's Jude Quinn is a tremendous success in presenting the electric Dylan of the mid-sixties. Heath Ledger's bad-family-man Dylan was a terrible failure (and it is very sad to see Ledger so horribly miscast in what would turn out to be one of his last roles). Richard Gere's version of Dylan as Billy the Kid was also strange, never quite shifting over to the Dylan of the Basement Tapes, never quite shifting over into any version of Dylan. I found it also strange that he was not asked to perform at all. I don't know if Gere can sing, but I've read that he is a professional quality guitarist and played professionally before becoming an actor. The other Dylan's were moderately successful. The short version is that Cate Blanchett was extraordinary, Heath Ledger was wildly inappropriate, while the other Dylan's were average (though Christian Bale's version of Dylan in his Jesus phase was fascinating).

If you know don't much about Dylan's career and life this could be a hard film to follow. Some of it was based nearly word for word on real life interviews, especially some of Blanchett's scenes. Some bits seem to have very little basis in Dylan's life, such as his marriage to Louise (perhaps the details were changed more there than elsewhere for legal reasons). Dylan obviously never became a Christian minister, though he did go through a religious phase that he has never completely renounced. A good deal of the content was supplied by myth. For instance, when Dylan plugged in at the Newport Folk Festival (the New England Folk Festival in the film), he was greeted with far less anger than many have stated (and it is borne out by concert recordings). Not all booed. And Pete Seeger denies that he tried to cut an electrical cable with an ax (though he does say he tried to get the volume turned down).

The film creates elaborate fantasies about Dylan's early life, but that at least is similar to lies Dylan told upon first going to New York, telling people he was an orphan and that he had spent time riding the rails. Many of his closest friends where shocked when his parents turned up to hear him perform, just as they were astonished to learn that he was Jewish and from Minnesota. One can understand the temptation to create a film breaking down the Dylan mythos. Walt Whitman said of himself "I embrace multitudes." This is certainly true of Dylan as well. We can recognize the fragments of these myths by the various incarnations of his personal in this film, while still denying that the film always -- or even often -- does a good job of either "getting it right" or making much of a point when it does.

So, do I recommend this movie? To fans of Dylan, yes. If you know enough to argue with it and know where you need to deny or resist it, it can be -- at times -- fascinating. But if you are not terribly familiar with Dylan, check out Martin Scorsese's BOB DYLAN: NO DIRECTION HOME instead. That film doesn't delve into all the myths, but does focus brilliantly on one: Dylan's move from folk to electric music. Because the music that Dylan produced on albums like HIGHWAY 61 REVISITED and BLONDE ON BLONDE changed the face of music -- just about every important musical performer of the time, from the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Who, Otis Redding, Sam Cooke, the Motown stable of writers, the Kinks, the Beach Boys, and just about anyone else you care to name, completely rethought their writing, and especially the lyrical content of their songs, in response to Dylan. Every musician from the time of Dylan's electric turn has either been directly inspired by Dylan, or inspired by people upon whom Dylan was a major if not the major influence. But one will not get much of that from this film. June 22, 2008

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