On mythmaking

Rating: 3/10 (29 October 2007)

it is said that "I'm Not There" is the first fictional treatment of the life of Bob Dylan that has been approved by the artist. it is not surprising. It is a long winded exercise in mythmaking - packaging some incredibly imaginative sequences and performances with long sequences of great tedium. This is clearly not intended as a literal treatment of the Dylan life story but as an exploration of the multi-levelled nature of the man, his elusiveness, his own tendency to obscure and cloud and offer variable versions of his own biography. (The first volume of his so-called autobiography did something similar with its absurd razor sharp recollections of events in Greenwich village 40 years ago - descriptions of people's facial expressions, of the light on snow etc. Good writing etc... but unreliable). Well this film plays in the heart of unreliability - and aspires to reflect this genius through versions of his life, cutting back and forward in time, but not really reaching into the present beyond the use of a few relatively recent songs. The latest Dylan we encounter here is the born-again man. The Neverending Tour of the past fifteen years is not alluded to. The most powerful central core of this film is the mid-sixties Dylan, shot in stark black and white, with Cate Blanchett offers a dynamic performance as the electric muse - probably for most Dylan fans the moment of his greatest achievement. The evocation of this era is offered in a crackling and sharply scripted series of passages - though even here a degree of cliché is included (The Philip Jacobson style BBC cultural pundit is a cartoon and the cues to "Ballad Of A Thin Man" are so predictable!) There are plenty of cute references to other films, photography, quotations etc - Jonathan Miller's Alice, The Beatles, Dick Lester, Robert Frank etc. which are fun. ) However this is a film that is really rather unlikely to reach out beyond those already intrigued by the whole Dylan phenomenon. As a narrative it is as meandering as his own "Renaldo And Clara" venture and at times seems genuinely interminable. The passages featuring the Richard gere version of Dylan are the weakest - evoking the Big Pink/Band/Back to American roots era of Dylan after the "motorcycle crash". Some of the lines given to the "ghosts of Dylan in this film point to that core elusive self that Dylan protects - particularly when the Sixties electric Dylan starts talking about the music being "traditional" in a way wholly other than the idea of folk as popularised in the early sixties. I believe few who pay attention would asrgue with the idea of Dylan as a creative genius. I'm not sure this film offers much illumination on the nature of thast genius. Again one can quibble with certain details - the sequence where Pete Seeger is seen going for an axe at the Newport folk festival for instance (read White Bicycles by Joe Boyd to see this as another cloud of myth) but that may not be the point since the film is layer upon layer of myths and half truths and rumours. All in all though a long and not especially profound ride. Listen to the music instead. It could have been an hour longer with no gain or loss. There is sadly a sort of smug hipper than thou quality about the whole exercise.