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Todd Haynes' film I'm Not There, "inspired by the music and many lives of Bob Dylan," shows that art reveals truth when it has the imagination to move away from the imitation of reality.
Six actors (Christian Bale, Cate Blanchett, Marcus Carl Franklin, Richard Gere, Heath Ledger and Ben Whishaw) embody varied facets of Dylan, whose name is never mentioned. Each incarnation has a different name and narrative. These nonlinear narratives collide and overlap but remain independent of each other.
Franklin, a 13-year-old African-American, is Woody, a juvenile vagrant who hops boxcars. His beloved guitar is marked "This machine kills fascists."
Whishaw plays Arthur (the poet Rimbaud as Dylan), seated at a table throughout the film, facing the camera. He is eternally cross-examined by invisible interrogators.
Bale is Jack Rollins, the "Troubadour of Conscience" for a generation. He wears the acoustic guitar and harmonica rig of Dylan's early years but with his lean, long face more resembles Woody Guthrie.
Ledger is Robbie, a womanizing, self-centered movie star who once played Jack Rollins in a film. Charlotte Gainsbourg plays Claire, Robbie's wife and mother of his children. Gainsbourg is the emotional center of the Robbie sequences, transmitting, often through silence, the suffering of being caught between her love for Robbie and constant, subtle humiliation and loneliness.
Blanchett, in an exhilarating performance that transcends gender, is Jude Quinn, the "star of electricity." Jude, in a tapered black suit, with wild hair, hooded eyes and high cheekbones behind dark glasses, is an eerie invocation of Dylan in the mid- '60s. Blanchett deftly sidesteps the trap of "playing a man." She cuts to Jude's wiry cynicism about a world ravenous for celebrity, and the flash-bulb isolation of an intelligent, sensitive artist who sees and feels more than those who throng around him.
The final Dylan figure is Billy (the Kid), played by Gere, a grizzled cowboy. Billy lives on the outskirts of the frontier town Riddle: "Here I'm invisible, even to myself." Riddle faces annihilation -- plans for a six-lane highway through the center of town -- in the name of progress.
This shape-shifting extends to Haynes' kaleidoscopic directorial vision. Grainy black-and-white sequences mingle with shots artificially saturated with color: tender yellow-green fields outside an open boxcar, the deep blue-green of an urban evening, sallow yellow hospital light. Clips of the civil unrest of the '60s, race riots, John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King are mixed into the fabric of the film.
The different Dylan figures and their time lines break in upon each other, sometimes for only seconds, reminding us of their parallel existence. Billy looks out over the forested mountains in his Wild West era, sensing an unseen menace. It coalesces into napalm explosions in Vietnam, underscored by the raucous crashes of "All Along the Watchtower." The explosions draw us through a television screen into Robbie and Claire's world, revealing a wordless snapshot of their collapsing marriage before the camera abruptly returns us to Billy's mountains.
The realism of Jack Rollins, or Robbie and Claire, bumps up against surreal images of a massive tarantula crawling across a blank screen, a sperm whale animated in jerky Godzilla fashion, and dirty children with a dead pony. A girl with her head on fire stands ominously amid a crush of rabid fans. Jude Quinn appears in a puff of smoke, in a tribute to "A Hard Day's Night," with four dark-suited young men with bowl cuts. They tumble over each other in accelerated, helium-voiced hilarity. When Jude is whisked away by his handlers, the four young men with bowl cuts are seen in the distance, pursued by hordes of screaming girls. And in a brilliant paraphrasing of Dylan's "going electric" at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, Haynes conjures up a vision of Jude and his band spraying the stunned audience with machine gun fire.
See more stories tagged with: todd haynes, bob dylan, cate blanchett, richard gere
Eunice Wong is an actor based in New York City.
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