I'M NOT THERE

Reviewed for CompuServe by Harvey S. Karten
Weinstein Company
Grade: B
Directed by: Todd Haynes
Written By: Todd Haynes, Oren Kaufman, John Wells
Cast: Christian Bale, Cate Blanchett, Marcus Carl Franklin, Richard Gere, Heath Ledger, Ben Whishaw,
Charlotte Gainsbourg, David Cross, Bruce Greenwood, Julianne Moore, Michelle Williams
Screened at: Park Ave., NYC, 11/12/07
Opens: November 21, 2007

In Jason Reitman’s movie “Juno,” Ellen Page in the title role is pregnant. She’s told, “I didn’t know you were that kind of girl.” Being young and not fully developed emotionally and intellectually, she replies, “I don’t know what kind of girl I am.” Understandable, perhaps. Todd Haynes (“Safe,” “Velvet Goldmine,” “Poison”) thinks differently as one might expect of one of America’s truly independent filmmakers. His implication in the film “I’m Not There,” which he directs and co-wrote with Oren Kaufman and John Wells, is that maybe it’s not such a great idea to have a central core, an identity, a “being there.” Maybe John Lennon was a “there” person, a singer-celebrity that one could grasp onto, a friendly face whose death could set the world into mourning since he was a person we could say that we “knew.” Bob Dylan was not such a person, wherein lies the title of Haynes’s film—which actually comes from a specific song relating to his being “not there” emotionally for someone who needed him but in a more general, universal way for his being of a fluid identity.

Exploiting that aspect of the man, Haynes does something that pushes the biopic envelope. Instead of constructing a narrative about the man either chronologically or with flashbacks, midbacks, flashforwards and the like, he gives Bob Dylan six separate identities with six separate names, each of which represents a phase of his life. In other words, Dylan does not have a center, which is neither good nor bad, but a fact: he reinvents himself regularly. Haynes and his co-writers arbitrarily box him into historical categories, to wit: The Young Romantic (1959-1961); The Prophet (1962-1964); The Enigma (1965); The Innovator (1966); The Restless Lover (1964-1973); The Spiritualist (1979-1981); The Lone Gun (1967-). Phew! And I thought singers just strummed away then hopped on buses, trains and plains and rehearsed for five hours each day, spending the rest of their times with groupies—with no personalities of their own at all.

Maybe this is needless to say: the picture is a mess—but that’s not necessarily a negative comment, at least not to an indie filmmaker like Todd Haynes for whom the greatest insult might be “Haynes, you might a picture with a beginning, a middle and an end, with a few twists, a nice payoff, and a Hollywood conclusion.” In any case since Dylan himself approved of this “mess,” maybe he identifies strongly with his depiction as a man who has several fiercely strong personae, the essential opposite of Chance the Gardner in Hal Ashby’s “Being There.”

The most imaginative alter-ego is that of the 11-year-old kid (Marcus Carl Franklin) who calls himself Woody Guthrie out of his devotion to the white folk singer (get it? Bob Dylan as a youngster was devoted to Woody.) Woody rode the rails with the hoboes, telling lies, but he was a prodigy on the guitar who faked his way into the houses of the well-off until pursued by the law for escape from a reformatory.

When Woody is told by his benefactor to sing about his own time, he morphs into Jack (Christian Bale) who sings of who “The Times They Are A-Changin’” in Greenwich Village around the area of MacDougal and Bleecker Streets. (I’ve been wondering lately: when Bob Dylan sang contemptuously of the elders “you’re old and you’re rapidly aging,” what does he think of himself now that he’s sixty-six?)

Heath Ledger turns up as Robbie: lover, motorcyclist and 10-year husband-partner of the French painter Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg), and though they have a gorgeous home—brown venetian blinds, lush carpeting, stairwell, two kids-- they split perhaps because Robbie becomes a chauvinist pig stating that women cannot write poetry as well as men. There’s all kinds of reasons for splitting, I guess.

The chain-smoking Cate Blanchett turns up quite a bit as Jude Quinn, who states with a suppressed wink at the audience that she never really sang folk songs—whatever that means, and in side roles so do Allen Ginsberg performed by David Cross, a journalist by Bruce Greenwood, Alice Fabian by Julianne Moore, and sundry others, most poignantly Richard Gere to demonstrate Dylan’s pulling a J.D. Salinger by retreating into the sticks.

The principal pluses are that the pic is never dull. The principal minus is that it’s a mess—which is also a plus, since, how often do we get to see such flagrant originality even on the so-called indie circuit?

Rated R. 135 minutes © 2007 by Harvey Karten Member: NY Film Critics Online