I'm Not There (Two-Disc Collector's Edition)

"I'm not there" is simply brilliant and creative. This biopic portrays the many reinventions of Bob Dylan. He is first portrayed an 11 year old black boy named Woody who is full of ideals and hopes (and lies as well); his life is a made-up tale that is quickly uncovered personifying Dylan's stories about himself when he first started. He is then portrayed by Christian Bale as a born-again singer (Christian Bale). Ben Wishaw plays a poet who is being interrogated by unseen authorities as to why he has stop protesting. He is also a sort of narrator to this movie. Heath Ledger plays the actor Jack Rollins who struggles with fame and maintaining his family. Cate Blanchett plays the despondent, drugged out Jude that is unwilling to answer any questions of journalists. He is later portrayed by Richard Gere as an outlaw, living in anonymity.

Each character personifies a part of, a stage of Dylan's life. My favorite parts of this movie were Cate Blanchett's and Winshaw's interpretations of their characters. They were thoroughly portrayed and provided a very revealing take on the movie. This is a film that I really enjoyed.

Was there any purpose served in trying to portray Dylan in this manner? Was any insight offered? Was there some Hollywood come-as-your-favorite-rock-star party that this thing developed out of? What's next, "The Life and Times of Jimi Hendrix" played by the Muppets?

I stand confused your honor......

There is something about "I'm Not There" that lets you know at once it is more than a biopic showing six different facets of the subject. Yes, the characters change from the exuberant, tall-tale telling Woody(Marcus Carl Franklin), to Arthur Rimbaud (Ben Wishaw), poet, being interrogated in a principal's or detective's or someone's office, to entitled and spoiled Jude Quinn (Cate Blanchett), to movie star Robbie (Ledger) to folk "hero" Jack Rollins (Bale) to Billy the Kid (Gere) and back and forth between them. This is an homage, as Todd Haynes reveals on the commmentator track, to all the different film styles in the sixties and seventies, to the directors- he mentions Fellini, Goddard, and Peckinpah by name, but I see glimmers of Scorcese and Sergio Leone --to the techniques in vogue at the time, and to the backdrop of progressive change in art and human relations.

The shuttle of characters associated with their assigned 20th century director "mentor" works incredibly smoothly, and it also helps to delineate the six characters.

When Jude Quinn's (Blanchett's) story begins, we've learned through part of Jack Rollin's tale that Dylan had gotten bored with protest songs, and had begun writing songs with content and style. This theme carries on into that of Quinn's. Blanchett reenacts the infamous electric act at the Newport Jazz Festival, which many thought would be the death knell for Dylan. Then, aside from the "London" garden party, (like everything else, filmed in Montreal) featuring a delightful shot of the four-headed, eight-legged johnpaulgeorgeandringo, frolicking in the grass with Jude and talking very fast after he introduces it to a different kind of smoke, ("My tribute to Richard Leicester [A Hard Day's Night Haynes says), the rest of Jude's story consists of sparring. Haynes allows Blanchett's character some of the ugliness Dylan is supposed to have shown to his friends and his fans during the years his style deviated from folk protest songs, to rock songs with subjects some thought superficial. A journalist acts like everyman, or perhaps even Jude's concience, turning up even in the elevator, asking "Who is Jude Quinn? If you are not singing protest songs any more, does that mean you do not believe what you were singing? And if so, what do you believe?" Black and white psychedelia, such as a tarantula crawling across the lens of the camera, continues the Fellini theme. In the end Blanchett is permitted to act out Dylan's reaction, which few really know, to publication of his true identity as a middle class Jewish kid from Hibbing, Minnesota, which must have felt like a huge tear in the mystique he had built up for himself. She does it superbly.

Robbie's story is splashed with the pale colors and spare dialogue of a Jean-Luc Goddard film, and like Goddard, the story of Claire and Robbie (mirroring Dylan's first marriage, and the Vietname war) struggles with traditional expectations of women, using the character of a strong woman to outline the character's contradictions: Robbie, like Dylan, loves women, and is devoted to his woman (at least at first). But he's chauvinist, quoted directly in the film as saying, "Women can't be poets." But I wonder if there isn't a bit of Martin Scorcese in this too, with the raw emotion between Robbie and Claire, the theme of redemption...though never requited,Robbie being perhaps the Dylan that hurts...and loses...the most.

We don't know if Billy (Gere) is someone pretending to be Billy the Kid in the 20th Century or is the real Billy the Kid ; what we do know is that Dylan sometimes fancied himself a sort of Kid-type outlaw. Chasing his runaway dog leads Billy into the village and their troubles. Pat Garret shows up, and this doesn't end the Dylan saga, but it makes Billy a refugee like the others . A Peckinpah-ish vision of Western scenery in which Halloween costumed people pack up all their belongings and shuffle off to accomadate a 6 lane highway ensues. Animals from a deserted zoo wander about, and a soldier (or someone wearing a soldier costume) in clown face and his compatriates sing a funeral song for a girl who's committed suicide and lies in an open casket, "Goin to Acapulco" which to date, I think, is the most beautiful Dylan song I've heard. By now, and as the police move in on Garret, we're not watching Peckinpah, we're watching Leone, specifically, the prison scene in Il Buono Il Brutto Il Cattivo when soldiers are forced to sing to cover up the noise of torture.

Billy's function as far as the Bard is concerned is to keep him off the world stage for awhile, mimicking Dylan's hiatus in Woodstock (when he didn't even go to Woodstock). The story picks up with Jack Rollins, who has become Father John, having followed his girlfriend and band member into her evangelical-pentecostal church.

Christian Bale makes a valiant effort at portraying what I'm sure he or Haynes thinks a Vinyard pastor looks like...unless they were deliberately trying to distance Vinyard for the purposes of making their own story and not Dylan's. But it comes off as rather stiff. And Hayne's comments in his track reveal his discomfort with Dylan's foray into evangelicalism, speaking of earlier cuts of Father John making homophobic statements, and telling the "documentarian" that one's perfect lifestyle and great deeds will earn you a place in heaven....counter to orthodox Christianity and the Vinyard statement of faith, which leaves salvation completely up to God. The film style, however, is spot on, recalling grainy seventies documentaries about "the silent majority", "the New Evangelicals", while people first tried to understand a President who talked about being "born again" (Jimmy Carter), then the evangelicals so wedded to traditional values booted him out and elected an Episcopalian. It also has the look and feel of Christian "scare" films, before Left Behind - The DVD Collection (Left Behind / Left Behind II - Tribulation Force / Left Behind - World at War)put such awfulness in the mainstream.....no, I mean get saved or die films like A Thief in the Night


The commentary track is great for film buffs, not just for talking through the Dylan trivia if you didn't happen to be born in say, 1951, but for the times you'll say, "I knew I saw that somewhere!" when Haynes comes up with another cinematic cross reference.

I was confused about one thing. The choice of Marcus Carl Franklin, an eleven year old black kid, who never gets treated like a kid, and who never gets treated like a black in the segregated south, to symbolize the twenty-something b.s.-ing Dylan in New York, was brilliant.

So why, especially since the Jude Quinn story also focused on an aspect of Dylan in which he sought to hide, and a time when he was devastated when reality showed through his carefully crafted disguise, did Cate Blanchett have to dress like a boy? Did the writer or director ever consider the character, Judy Quinn? Just curious.

"I'm Not There" is a brave attempt to capture the essence of the enigma that is Bob Dylan. Director Todd Haynes goes out on a limb with some artsy manouvers: firstly, a whole series of actors depict different sides of Dylan's personality, secondly a lot of the biographical information is skewed or simply made-up, and thirdly the film consists of a number of vignettes based on actual performances and interviews rather than telling a story. Sadly the film is a failure. The multiple actors are off-putting, the fictional elements are confusing, and without any narrative thrust the whole thing soon becomes very boring. The liberal use of Bob Dylan's music is the only thing that redeems it. Better to watch Scorsese's documentary "No Direction Home" if you want to get closer to Dylan.

i'm a big dylan fan. i loved this movie. it makes you thing about dylan's work and his personal life and makes excellent attempts to portray the forces that shaped his art, personality and life. this is a wonderful film if you open your mind and scrap any expectations. Haynes does a magnificent job and his art and vision was greatly appreciated. dylan's spirit and history is in every moment of this epic tour de force and the respect and admiration for dylan is everywhere. this film is an excellent addition to the dylan landscape. it's value will increase with time.