I'm Not There

Ty Burr had a great line in his Boston Globe review of this film: “Either Dylan takes up a sizable block of psychic real estate in your head or you think he sings like a goat.” I am certainly of the former party, but even for me Todd Haynes’ film was a bit too adoring, a tad too clever, a little cultish. I liked it but at some point I started asking myself how much more of it I was obliged to watch, a fairly fatal lapse in attentiveness. Each of the fifteen minutes past two hours was a minute too long. I did not get the same sense of longueurs in Scorsese’s four-hour Dylan doc, No Direction Home. The trick of having 6 different actors depict Bobby Zimmerman’s different lives, or the eras of Bob Dylan’s career, is artfully done -- beyond question Haynes is an accomplished and passionate filmmaker -- but the segments are uneven, as well as sliced and diced to excess. As everyone has noted, Cate Blanchett is amazing as the Don’t Look Back Dylan, but the performance is rather superfluous since we already have the D.A. Pennebaker film. Christian Bale and Richard Gere do not register with anything like her force, nor does Heath Ledger as the Hollywood avatar, though his scenes have the advantage of the always striking Charlotte Gainsbourg as the wife being lost to celebrity. The black youth who represents Dylan’s phase as an acolyte of Woody Guthrie is so appealing that the implausibility does not faze the viewer. If the phantasmagoria eventually wears thin, there’s always the music, but better when it’s actually in Dylan’s voice. When the “real” Dylan -- or at least the guy that carries his driver’s license -- appears in the last shot of the film, blowing harp in tight close-up, I felt a double relief, back to actuality and done with this arduous play of masks. (2007, Images, n.) *7-* (MC-73.)