Sunday, November 25, 2007
A+E, Movies, Reviews
As Dylan, Cate Blanchett rules ‘I’m Not There’
Cate Blanchett in “I’m Not There”
CREDIT: Jonathan Wenk/TWC
“I’M NOT THERE”
Cate Blanchett, Christian Bale, Heath Ledger
Directed by Todd Haynes
Rated R
Landmark Midtown Art
Todd Haynes’ Bob Dylan fantasia
“I’m Not There” and Julie Taymor’s Beatles blunder “Across the
Universe” demonstrate, respectively, how and how not to interpret
musicians’ works for the screen. While Taymor made the Beatles’ lyrics
painfully literal and hitched them to an amusement-park version of the
’60s, Haynes (“Velvet Goldmine,” “Far from Heaven”) follows Dylan’s
lead. Like the singer, his movie is a thing of American mythologizing,
endless self-reinvention and glimmering elusiveness.
The movie fractures Dylan into six
iconic alter-egos, played by six actors. Heath Ledger is one of the
more memorable ones, playing a movie star called Robbie, balancing
celebrity and its temptations with marriage (to Charlotte Gainsbourg as
an abstract painter). Christian Bale is the earnest, ballad-singing
Jack (with Julianne Moore as his Joan Baez stand-in). But Cate
Blanchett owns the movie as Jude, the electric guitar-era Dylan (aka
“Judas” to his folky fans). Androgynous, awkward, studly and graceful
all at once, he/she’s a mesmerizing mumbler.
Likely to be enjoyed most by hardcore
Dylanites who get all the biographical/lyrical references, this
impressionistic head-trip of a movie doesn’t totally cohere. Much of
the time spent with Richard Gere—as a Billy-the-Kid version of Dylan,
stuck in a frontier town full of carnival folks—is a waste. But Haynes
shifts fluidly from black-and-white to color and casts a spell as he
approaches Dylan from instinctive, fabulist angles in an attempt to sum
up the musician’s evasive essence.
The film’s title couldn’t be more apt.
As history has shown, every time someone tries to pin down the “real”
Bob Dylan in one place, that’s exactly where he no longer is. THREE
STARS—Steve Murray