I'm Not There

I’m curious about anyone’s opinion in general, of course, but I’m especially interested in the opinions of those who have seen this movie and who have no real interest in or identification with the mystique of Bob Dylan - although I don’t imagine there are all that many people out there who land in the space where those two circles converge. The film trades heavily on that mystique, and though the music is there, too, it’s largely in the background, almost an afterthought. (I could be way wrong about this, because there is plenty of music in the film, but that’s the sense I got - that director Todd Haynes, while acknowledging the music through extensive inclusion in the film, put the focus of the film more on the person that the music helped to create and meant, quite specifically, for the music to ride shotgun.) I have the strong impression that this film will not appeal all that much to people who are not, to some degree, fascinated with Bob Dylan.

I count myself among that number, and was interested in the film in that respect; but the cast was also quite strong, and people whose faces I had not expected to see, for whatever reason, kept showing up. It’s possible that I knew they were in the film when we played it, but have since filed that information away somewhere in the back of my head - so it surprised me when, early in the film, Julianne Moore showed up, playing Alice Fabian (Joan Baez). It was also a pleasant surprise to see Charlotte Gainsbourg as Claire (Sara Lownds).

Unfortunately, due to the film’s long running time (two hours and fifteen minutes), I did not have a chance to sit down and watch it from beginning to end; in fact, I watched parts of it on three non-consecutive days over the course of the last week, and I am afraid that my appreciation - not to mention comprehension - of the movie suffered beacuse of that. I still liked it - there’s much to like for Dylan geeks - but it never really grabbed me as a totally coherent project. Of course, that could well be a statement about the not particularly coherent life of Bob Dylan - or the early part of that life, at any rate. The film is a stylistic interpretation of Dylan’s life from early adulthood to around the time of the motorcycle accident, and features six different actors playing various “versions” of Dylan. (Four of the six are white men - the other two are a white woman and a young black boy.)

And when I say “stylistic,” what I mostly mean is that film editor Jay Rabinowitz was apparently just let loose to cut and paste as he saw fit. I didn’t get a good sense of the overall tone that Haynes was trying to convey - some of the Dylans were seated firmly in the gritty realism camp, and others were in a more ethereal, otherworldly, totally fictionalized kind of place - and I don’t think that the editing helped all that much, even though Rabinowitz is a talented and accomplished editor. He’s worked extensively with indie stalwarts Darren Aronofsky and Jim Jarmusch, and his work on Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream is some of the best film editing I’ve ever seen. There may have been too many threads to try to fit together here. The film is coherent, but its sense of chronology is muddled; and the editing overall comes off as affected, rather than effective.

Anyway...is there anyone out there who saw this film and doesn’t count him- or herself a Dylan geek? I’m interested to know how this film worked (or didn’t work) on objective viewers.