Becoming an artist, we?re told, is about finding your voice. But what if you have not one voice, but many? What if you grope about in the darkness of the creative psyche and come up with not one persona but half a dozen? This, Todd Haynes would have us believe, is the secret of the enigma that is Dylan, and his new movie I?m Not There [hyperlink] attempts to unmask this persona by placing not one but six mirrors around the great man, in the hope that at least one of them will catch his true face….
It?s an intriguing and courageous idea, but the end result [is a] trip through a series of distorted and grotesque images, a carnival house of mirrors that leaves you entertained and weirded out, but no nearer a sense of what you?re supposed to be seeing than when you first went in.
What Haynes does get right is the impossibility of pinning Dylan down. Because it?s not just, as the BBC reporter played by Bruce Greenwood says in a mock telecast in the movie, that Dylan?s sneering, trademark sound conveys a certain sincerity, a certain attitude to life. The truth is that Dylan?s songs are a kind of peripheral poetry?profound and meaningful [seen sideways], but rarely able to survive being looked at straight on. You can stare at a Dylan song as hard as you like, and (unless you?re seriously stoned) you?ll find yourself wondering what the hell you ever saw in it, but you won?t be able to shake the feeling that something very beautiful just went down here; and you won?t be wrong. It?s this will-of-the-wisp-ness, this sense of (forgive me) blowin? in the wind, that makes Dylan, well, necessary, if only because life is like that too. The fleeting poetry of Dylan?s best songs evokes the rhythms of travel and heartbeat, a heightened sense of the self that connects us to the imagination of a generation, makes the everyday seem somehow timeless. That?s why we love the man?s music. It?s a free-wheeling quality that Haynes film shares….
In the end, perhaps the best comment on I?m Not There comes in the film itself, in what is, for me, the high point of the movie, a surreal rendition of Ballad of a Thin Man where Blanchett (playing Quinn/Dylan) looks straight into the camera and says ?You know something is happening here, but you don?t what it is. Do you, Mr Jones??. Dylan, as always, has the last word.
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