Spring Break
Movie Review
'I'm Not There'
David Coley
Issue date: 12/3/07 Section: Culture
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Robert Zimmerman once said, "Chaos is a friend of mine." He also said, "I accept chaos. I'm not sure whether it accepts me." Zimmerman once said, "I consider myself a poet first and a musician second. I live like a poet and I'll die like a poet." He also said, "I think a poet is anybody who wouldn't call himself a poet." Stranger still, Zimmerman once said, "There is nothing so stable as change."
Of course, you know Zimmerman better by his popular moniker of Bob Dylan. And that name has been the most consistent aspect of the man we have seen. For, as the film "I'm Not There" shows, Dylan has gone through numerous transformations, moving from one persona to the next just as the public was getting familiar with the old one.
And, as you might have already heard, the way writer/director Todd Haynes handles these transformations is the revolutionary part of the film. Six different actors play versions of the artist, each with different names, but none named Bob Dylan. They are revealing in their differences, and each occupies a distinct world of his own.
Consider the peculiarly precocious 11-year-old Marcus Carl Franklin, who embodies Dylan as a guitar-playing boxcar tramp traveling under the name of Woody Guthrie, the folk hero of Dylan's youth. Or the young philosopher Arthur Rimbaud, played by Ben Whishaw, who is only seen in interview-style clips, spouting mantras like and including some of those mentioned above.
There's also Christian Bale as Jack Rollins, an embodiment of Dylan's protesting folk hero of New York City. Heath Ledger appears as Robbie, an actor who starts out portraying Rollins in a film and encounters some marital troubles. Plus there's Richard Gere as Billy the Kid, lifted from Dylan's appearance in Sam Peckinpah's western "Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid."
The most talked-about performance in the film is sure to be Cate Blanchett as Jude Quinn, Dylan's post-folk personality. Her segment begins with the Newport Music Festival where Dylan outraged fans by going electric. The scene is both true to history and fanciful: Pete Seeger runs around with an axe threatening to chop the power cords while Jude and his band blast the audience away with machine guns.
Of course, you know Zimmerman better by his popular moniker of Bob Dylan. And that name has been the most consistent aspect of the man we have seen. For, as the film "I'm Not There" shows, Dylan has gone through numerous transformations, moving from one persona to the next just as the public was getting familiar with the old one.
And, as you might have already heard, the way writer/director Todd Haynes handles these transformations is the revolutionary part of the film. Six different actors play versions of the artist, each with different names, but none named Bob Dylan. They are revealing in their differences, and each occupies a distinct world of his own.
Consider the peculiarly precocious 11-year-old Marcus Carl Franklin, who embodies Dylan as a guitar-playing boxcar tramp traveling under the name of Woody Guthrie, the folk hero of Dylan's youth. Or the young philosopher Arthur Rimbaud, played by Ben Whishaw, who is only seen in interview-style clips, spouting mantras like and including some of those mentioned above.
There's also Christian Bale as Jack Rollins, an embodiment of Dylan's protesting folk hero of New York City. Heath Ledger appears as Robbie, an actor who starts out portraying Rollins in a film and encounters some marital troubles. Plus there's Richard Gere as Billy the Kid, lifted from Dylan's appearance in Sam Peckinpah's western "Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid."
The most talked-about performance in the film is sure to be Cate Blanchett as Jude Quinn, Dylan's post-folk personality. Her segment begins with the Newport Music Festival where Dylan outraged fans by going electric. The scene is both true to history and fanciful: Pete Seeger runs around with an axe threatening to chop the power cords while Jude and his band blast the audience away with machine guns.
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