One of the most amazing editing ever

Rating: 10/10 (22 November 2007)

It seems that Todd Haynes took a long time to make this movie. After having seen it 3 times in the last couple of months, I can understand why. Since the music must have been the whole focus of it since the beginning and of course the movie being not a musical, the only way to connect such a complex array of stories was to resort to silent movies style of editing. And how it did succeed. Were Eisenstein still alive, he would be crying tears of joy, after watching I'm Not There. Some scenes are a perfect display of intellectual montage. In particular the first and the last one featuring Heath Ledger and Charlotte Gainsbourg, with pictures of Venus statues and of the Mona Lisa painting representing the dialectal relationship between art and beauty, then with images of Kissinger signing the peace treaty with the Vietnamese representing the result of the agreement that Claire delivers to Robbie. The music is never there just as an embellishment, only to make a nice soundtrack to buy and play. It always interacts with the frames. A couple of moment really struck me: 'Blind Willie McTell' on the scene where the kid visits a dying Guthrie, just as to connect two founding fathers of Dylan's inspiration and the sequence when Billy/Richard Gere asks to a family where are they going and the picture freezes while the song on the background screams 'to the valley below'. The heterogeneity of the materials used is just amazing, from real archive footage to stills of pictures reminding of real Dylanesque material (LP covers with Jack/Christian Bale instead of Bob), from grainy small format films taken with a hand camera to careful tracking shots in black and white showing a stratified field depth. And a tracking shot, probably the longest one in the movie, is also the moment in which a big hint to the real nature of the singer is presented: when Jude/Cate Blanchett follows Coco showing his nakedness and naivety in relating with women (how daring from a woman playing a male character). Most of this movie is already an instant classic: expect very soon to see quoted sequences like the one in which Keenan Jones (Bruce Greenwood) is exposed to the fact that he is the 'thin man' of the ballad. Maybe not an easy movie to follow the first time, but it will gratify enormously anyone who has the patience of trying the catch its essence, frame after frame. After all, nothing is linear in the life of a man who has been living a hundred times in a single lifespan.