The Whole Really Is Not the Sum of Its Parts

Rating: 8/10 (8 September 2008)

Todd Haynes's complex portrait is an endeavor to wholeheartedly take into account the paradoxical conflicts and ambiguities of Bob Dylan by fabricating itself upon vast inconsistencies. Haynes's method is to craft six Bob Dylans and use six actors to play them. In this fashion, each Dylan is coherent and unswerving on his own terms, and the existence of Bob Dylan all together need not bind collectively.
There are so many Bob Dylans that it is easier said than done to place which ones you like, and on which you look down. I have never followed his work or his career other than finding a small handful of his songs to be catchy, but many people spent years detesting Dylan on the foundation of one thing and then submitted to a change of heart after another thing years later. Rarely has such a publicized celebrity internalized himself so indulgently as to obscure his trajectory and conceal his essence, and ultimately, the masses are left with the work, which is all the creator is truly obliged to contribute to them.
What Haynes achieves is the deduction of the heartening parentheses and forays that maintain that everything springs and seems sensible, and to illustrate what is in actuality disorder and confusion beneath the versatile juxtaposition of each strand of the movie. One of the actors is a little black kid who claims to be Woody Guthrie; a second is a Greenwich Village folk singer played by Christian Bale, a third is Heath Ledger, appearing in the same film but never in the same shot as his future blockbuster counterpart Bale, as a performer acting in a Hollywood movie, who takes it easy and starts a family, a fourth is Cate Blanchett curiously in one of her most arousing screen appearances as a folk hero who estranges his followers by changing from acoustic to electric, a fifth is an actor played by Richard Gere appearing in a western about Billy the Kid, a sixth is a Dylan surrendering to a controversial interview regarding his career, and then we double back again to Christian Bale, who plays a purposely skewed agent of ambiguity, either a seventh Dylan or a renovation of the first, now a born-again Christian.
No attempt is presented to rationalize how these Dylans are really one whole Dylan, which is the purpose. By fashioning this patchwork of Bob Dylans, Haynes assembles a portrait not of the man but of our incompatible perceptions. Coming away from "I'm Not There," one has replenished one's palette for a few of Dylan's songs, we've seen six exceptionally able actors put to the test for the first time in a long time by taking on the roles of components of a total person. And I was very fond of the Fellini references in Cate Blanchett's thread.