Positive Liberty

Constant Viewer rarely frequents the so-called Art Houses lest he find himself accidentally watching a French or, even worse, Swedish movie. Still, sometimes Mohammad must go to the mountain, a case in point being CV’s recent sojourn to see Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There. Described by IMDb as “ruminations on the life of Bob Dylan, where seven [?] characters embody a different aspect of the musician’s life and work,” I’m Not There might more aptly be described as ruminations on the fantasies of a Dylan fan boy.

CV admits to having been, long ago in a universe far, far away, a bit of a fan boy of Dylan, himself, going so far as actually trying to read his first edition copy of Tarantula. Well, it was the 60s and early 70’s, after all, and Dylan was both at the height of his creativity and the nation’s most mesmerizing parking-meter. So mesmerizing, in fact, that some forty years later his 2006 Modern Times actually topped the U.S. album charts, perhaps the greatest evidence ever of Einstein’s definition of insanity as doing the same thing over and over (i.e., buying Dylan albums after Blood on the Tracks) and expecting different (i.e., not disappointing) results.

Returning, however, to the topic at hand, I’m Not There explores Haynes’ personal Dylanology as manifest in the performances of six separate actors representing different personae of Hibbing, Minnesota’s favorite son. By way of actually doing a tiny bit of movie reviewing here, CV found Ben Whishaw’s Dylan cum Arthur Rimbaud and especially Cate Blanchett’s Dylan cum Jude the ‘Judas’ the most entertaining and captivating. Hayne’s casting of Marcus Carl Franklin’s Dylan cum faux Woody Guthrie was simply silly even though the young Franklin’s performance was really quite good, while his Richard Gere as Dylan cum Billy the Kid was incomprehensible. Which, come to think of it, makes perfect sense if the objective there was to capture Dylan’s frankly bizarre film career. (Who needs waterboarding when we could be breaking Islamist militants by forcing them to watch repeated showings of Renaldo and Clara and Masked and Anonymous?)

But that is only to say that Blanchett’s and Whishaw’s roles comported most closely with CV’s own Visions of Dylana. Truth be told, none of our chameleon troubadour’s various visages are themselves in the slightest bit reliable. Dylan has so successfully made a lifetime career of hiding himself in public that any attempt or pretense at capturing the “real Bob Dylan” is likely as accurate as a blind man’s pencil sketches of the shadows in Plato’s cave. Was Chronicles, Vol. 1 legitimate autobiography or merely more of Robert Allen Zimmerman’s carefully crafted mythos? Who knows? CV wouldn’t be surprised to find that by now even Dylan, himself, isn’t sure.

What CV can say by way of recommending I’m Not There – which he does in a modest “wait for the DVD” sort of way – is that it is well crafted, visually fascinating and, especially in Blanchett’s Dylan sparring back and forth with Bruce Greenwood’s delightfully annoying British reporter, a meditation on celebrity and the often tenuous relation between appearance and reality. Then again, since when did anyone ever go to the movies expecting reality?

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