Masculine Feminine

The Many Masks of Mister Bob Dylan in Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There

On July 29, 1966, a twenty-five-year-old Bob Dylan and his Triumph motorcycle took a tumble near his Woodstock, New York home. This momentous and mysterious occurrence—Dylan’s manifest collapse after riding his bone-thin body without relent to produce his for-all-time Sixties trilogy (Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde)—is just one of Dylan’s fracturing, pre- and post- fill-in-the-blank points—points of no real return for his Mercurial Majesty and his fans.

Director Todd Haynes stages the incident as the chosen entry and end point of his dazzling (in its full definition), Dylan-approved docudrama of the “many lives” of the palimpsest artist, I'm Not There. It’s a blustering bullet to the Artist’s Biopic—as seen, for instance, in the Cash cash cow Walk the Line or even its to-be-released parody Walk Hard. With a 135-minute long parade of Dylanology—those lyrics, ex-loves, teeming trivia, obsessions, and obvious objects—the endlessly playful film is at once entertaining and engaging, at times messy and tortuous. Most often, thankfully, it is intelligent and intrepid, with its central conceit (six actors playing seven Dylan “associates”) registering as a gimmick/gamble that continually rewards. Each incarnation is placed beneath our personal stencils of the period-placed Dylan(s) and whether the “authentic” act shades in or distances from the preconceived, it is consistently provocative. At this, it offers a self-aware (as Dylan always was) appreciation of the unknowable American artist of restlessness, references, and endless reset buttons—the coolest cat with nine (well seven here) lives.

It’s meta-, all-for-one take on Dylan is alike Dylan’s own electric explosion, a mimetic artwork made with guts and gusto; but the question remains, is it a Dylan-fan me gusto mucho? The film appears made with the informed in mind, with its connective tissues teased with reference; yet it allows, however narrow a crevice, for the new-to-the-material and the open-minded with its evocative, montage-made incision into what “Bob Dylan” is and inspires. For better or worse, it remains faithful to Dylan as Dylan dared to be—evasive, mysterious, monstrous, charismatic, etcetera—while supplementing it with an enlivening assembly (design, documentary footage) of Sixties and Seventies Americana. I’m Not There is a compulsive compiler of Dylan fact and fiction, always infusing the information with the man’s omnipresent spirit of freedom to be and self-discovery. Its success rests in imaginatively channeling this essence into his illusive and allusive “autobiography,” drawing from his self-invented roles and his prefab points of reference (positively Pennebaker’s Don’t Look Back).

This, then, is Indirect Cinema. Haynes’ studied, spilling-over approach is as inspired as Minnesota’s own Robert Zimmerman’s songs and incarnations as a New York hipster or born-again preacher. Like Dylan drawing from folk, Dada, modernism, or the Beats, Haynes (as in his Sirk-inspired Far from Heaven) extracts scenes and style from Dylan’s filmic texts (prerequisite viewings include Eat the Document and Scorsese’s No Direction Home) and his loves (the Western, Fellini, French New Wave) and reinvigorates them in a nimble new context. Dylan’s accident in 1966, coincidentally, is the same year that Jean-Luc Godard, another Sixties giant, released Masculine Feminine, his sociopolitical study of Paris. Dylan and Godard are, in several senses, kindred artists: both adamantly adjusted their creative output to stray from standard fare and their earlier elaborations on form; both wove politics, Pop culture, social commentary, and their personal obsessions into a newfound art; and both mainstreamed poetry while proclaiming their way to fame.

More pointedly, Masculine Feminine features a scene in which Jean-Pierre Léaud asks, “Who are you, Mister Bob Dylan?" This befuddled question is followed by a lesson in linguistics: in “masculine” there is “mask” and “ass” and in feminine there is “nothing.” This is the first entryway into Haynes' film and Bob Dylan: the masculine (or series of masks) myth of all-over adventure and the misogynistic bent. The second, and the raison d’être for Haynes’ narrative style, is a direct quote from Godard: “a story should have a beginning, middle, and end…but not necessarily in that order.” The Frenchman’s formal inventiveness is co-opted from the get-go and remains prominent throughout, such as Sixties-society panning shots and bracing gunshots that sound visual edits. The Nouvelle Vague-style title shot materializes as a blinking on-screen development: “I’m he”…”I’m her”…”I’m here”…”I’m not here”…”I’m not there.” This pointed illusiveness (and allusiveness) tacks the tone at the forefront. From this aesthetic springboard, the film vaults into its disunited states of Dylan with the effusive, jingle-jangling “Stuck in Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again.”

The first sighting of the protean protagonist, as mentioned above, glimpses him motorcycling across the screen and crashing off-screen. “Take what you have gathered from coincidence” wrote Dylan and beginning a story about a self-mythologizing “savior” as such suggests Lawrence of Arabia and its hero’s own crash-and-burn. Thusly, the myth commences with the eleven-year-old African-American avatar, Woody Guthrie (Marcus Carl Franklin), tracking his train hopping and repartee with transients. An amusing, walking Anthology of American Folk Music, Woody totes a case announcing “This Machine Kills Fascists”-- a nod to his idolized Great Historical Bum namesake whom he later visits on his deathbed. For his age and for 1959 (as he is reminded), he is overly ready for story, ridiculously worldly and jives with bucolic folks over ballad sessions. The film’s emotional bedrock comes from a substitute mother figure from a family that offers him bed and board; she scolds, in between the boy’s self-aggrandizing hollering, to “sing of your own time.”

The next mask is Christian Bale as Jack Rollins (after Ramblin’ Jack Elliott), the all-duck-and-no-flash Greenwich Village protest troubadour. The documentary-designed segment is all exaggerated exuberance, consisting of amusing album covers and photos interspersed with talking heads from the Dylan retinue, including Joan Baez-replacement Alice Fabian (Julianne Moore). Rollins’ lack of charisma (not to say anything of Bale’s spot-on impersonation, which is later buttressed beautifully with his preposterous Pastor John, the born-again, gospel Dylan) is compensated for by the smug movie-star Robbie (Heath Ledger), who Method acts him in a biopic titled Grain of Sand. Robbie loves himself as much as Dylan loves himself, which is to say quite a bit. He is caught in the last days of his marriage to an abstract artist, Claire (an incandescent Charlotte Gainsbourg channeling Suze Rotolo and Sara Dylan), whom he has two children with. Before arriving at their present state, Haynes obligingly backpedals to their back-story: as “the new James Dean,” Robbie meets Claire on set and after an onslaught of perfunctory romance (the lines lifted from Masculine Feminine), they marry.

It is the age of James Bond and Vietnam now and Haynes crafts the marital relationship in close relation to the ongoing overseas conflict, contextualizing it while delivering its dissolution with a cultural moment. Robbie and Claire’s domestic disputes, stemming from his womanizing, are capped by Robbie’s critical comments about women at a café confab with friends. His appalled friend tells him that he has changed, to which he accuses the same. Robbie, tender and temperamental and played legitimately large by Ledger, is the essential crux of Dylan; one supposes he is simply reacting against the contemporary cultural mores and modes.

Overlaid on these parallel personas is the aphorism-spouting Arthur Rimbaud (Ben Whitshaw), the least seen of the masks. Each alternating Dylan alias isn’t that complex in his/her one-note, self-aware acting assignments (though there are several standout performances) and Haynes overcomes this with fluctuating color-corrections, different film stocks, and associative editing rhythms (handled handsomely by Jay Rabinowitz). Once each Dylan template is introduced, however, Haynes becomes a slot-machine situationist, scissoring between narrative lines, surprising and stimulating us with a game of which mask will appear. The preeminent performance among the masquerades is Cate Blanchett’s Dylan of Dylans, the amphetamine-addled, Ray Ban-ed rock star Jude Quinn.

All cheekbones and masterful mimicry, Blanchett’s mod sequence is a snare shot to the narrative, shot in the vein of Don’t Look Back as blended with 8 ½. The material fascinates as Dylan’s is public persecuted as a Judas after going electric (imagined as an actual assault), but it is the Blanchett’s uncannily copied mannerisms (blinking, being gnomic, slouching, chain-smoking) that mesmerize. Haynes recreates Pennebaker’s vivacious black-and-white verité and several scenes from the definitive documentary (including aggressive press coverage led by a BBC “Mr. Jones”-ish journalist played by Bruce Greenwood) while imposing Fellini’s fans-in-the-face aesthetic and stunning set pieces. In the meanwhile, the mighty Quinn deals with mega-celebrity (man and media-made) while other celebrity artists pop up—namely a dancing Allen Ginsberg (David Cross) and a verbally abused “It” girl, Coco Rivington (Michelle Williams looking like Edie Sedgwick).

If that isn’t enough Dylan, Haynes saddles up the reclusive Billy the Kid (Richard Gere), or Mr. B to the cookie-cut citizens, as he exposes himself to Pat Garrett (the reference to Dylan’s starring role in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid) to prevent a proposed highway tearing through the town of Halloween. Like the spare sound of its influence, John Wesley Harding, the picture and pacing is simplified, although the color is amplified like an acid western (replete with garish makeup and giraffe). The segment appears almost reactionary with its quiet, end-of-an-era attitude side by side with the restlessness of the film, yet seems necessary if a bit bored.

Speaking of the impersonality of the artist, T.S. Eliot once wrote: “he is not likely to know what is to be done unless he lives in what is not merely the present, but the present moment of the past, unless he is conscious, not of what is dead, but of what is already living.” And as with Dylan, Haynes knows what must be done in bringing to multifarious life a timeless, multifarious artist. The film’s music moves between actual Dylan and cruise-control covers, but it is when that trembling voice is heard and that physical self is peeped near the end that we realize that this entire endeavor is about this voice, this man. For all of I’m Not There’s self-aware recreations and self-obvious stylistics (a tarantula crawling on the wall after Dylan’s freewheeling Tarantula), all the filmic highways, byways, and roads lead to the own-road-taking self that is Bob Dylan. Eventually even the contradictions coalesce to offer as “clear” a picture possible of the enigmatic artist, on his own terms and on his own time.

Full-Blooded Emotions on Emulsion

The Coens’ Enormous Yes, No Country For Old Men

Within the critical calibrations of the Ethan and Joel Coens’ latest, the catalytic No Country for Old Men, there is a sort of scientific formula of keywords spouted constantly. It’s a welcome return to form for the Coens: disturbingly dark, chilling, nihilistic, a ha-ha haircut. These bullet-pointed views are chiefly uttered as point-blank reactions to cinema’s creep-du-jour, a character named Anton Chigurh (pronounced as phonetic hybrid of sugar and shocker, played too plausibly by Javier Bardem), a humorless, hewn-from-hell, and merciless mercenary.

As the first literary adaptation by the brothers (in this case of the book by canonized novelist Cormac McCarthy), No Country offers an old-fashioned morality play joined to a modern Hitchcockian thriller, one lush with the requisite color and currency of expression (as with the keywords) and set against the Coen’s intense “heroism-is-dead” vision, all played out on a West Texas wasteland terrain. McCarthy’s dark and detailed source novel offers up survival situations and stoic Texan-speak that equally sculpt the tenor of the film.

A Return to Form
During a gas-station exchange, the proprietor asks Chigurh if there is “something wrong…with anything?” Chigurh obliquely retorts, “Is that what you’re asking me? Is there something wrong with anything?” As it happens not much is wrong with the film in terms of its technical achievements, its prehensile performances, or its storytelling prowess: tense scene after tense scene. In fact, No Country is a rare sighting: an astoundingly controlled commercial vehicle with dynamic dashes of art-house argot like the beautiful, ethereal reflections of Good (Sheriff Bell) and Bad (Chigurh) off Moss’ turned-off television. A story told by raconteurs on reels, its unpleasant universe is an ugly extremity of reality that will leave one longing either for a Byzantium or for another outing with the Coens’ omnivorous style.

Ever the irrepressible ironists and impresarios of genre—even after their latest critical and commercial flops Intolerable Cruelty and The Ladykillers—the Coens here are at the very top of their craft; it is their finest film not named Fargo, which played organic to their peculiar tastes. As adapted by the acerbic brothers with a game glee-masked-as sobriety, this new narrative is as bleak and bestial as a Dark Ages tale, broken only intermittently by its offbeat, nervous humor. (Q: “It’s a mess, ain’t it sheriff?” A: “If it ain’t, it’ll do ‘til the mess gets here.”) Never sermonizing, the movie settles on this seesawing between humor and horror, the pacing executed with the energetic exactness of some simplified science.

Disturbingly Dark, Chilling, Nihilistic
Set amidst the sparse stretches of West Texas, all cracked caliche and scant shrubbery, it begins with the voice of third-generation lawman Ed Tom Bell, a man weighted with the emotional and mental pressure of living in a decadent and deadening 1980 drug-and-gun society and now bemoaning the change of times. (Tommy Lee Jones plays Bell with wind-sculpted weariness.) Antichrist-like Chigurh is captured and escapes soon enough in an outré manner that stamps the threatening, don’t-mess-with-this-Texan tone of the film.

The “very linear” storyline has Chigurh responsible for the setup of carnage that includes a cache of heroin, several corpses, shot-to-shit vehicles and an attaché case with $2.4 million stumbled upon by the movie’s protagonist, such as he is, a character named Llelewyn Moss (a terrific Josh Brolin). A prideful Everyman of nothing-new mentality (“yeah” is his underwhelming utterance upon discovering the money) and man of midnight epiphanies, Moss sends his sweet-pea, pouting wife (Kelly MacDonald) who senses grim ends, to stay with her Moss-hating mother. This is after, by attempting to assist a dying, agua-asking Mexican, he commits the Original Sin of thrillers: never return to the scene of the crime.

Much to his chagrin, to reclaim the money Chigurh must compete with a cadre of honcho-hired, Fargo-like fuck-ups, including Carson Wells (Woody Harrelson), a weasel wolf in a wool, but probably polyester, suit who employs volleys of rhetoric rather than volumes of firepower. Chigurh must also compete with the lagging old man Sheriff Bell who embodies Yeats’ original plaintive poem (the film and novel’s titles a lifted line)- he is a “tattered coat upon a stick” and “paltry thing.” Bell, itching to do something, is trapped in identifying with his powerless position against such Ultraviolence. With his Barney Fife-like deputy (Garret Dillahunt), Bell provides the movie’s classic Coen-like comedy—one part nutty naivety mixed with two parts dry wit—as well as its core moralist.

It’s a movie full of splendid surprises and visceral visions as Chigurh chases Moss across cities, crossing and recrossing the U.S.-Mexican border. Bloodbaths, off-screen slayings, moral depletion and entropy compose the supreme crime scenes as Moss exudes quiet fortitude even while fortissimo shots hit and miss their marks. Infusing an even more concentrated sense of menace is that the two never see each other—in fact, none of the three main characters are ever in the same frame as the Coens play off the viewer’s privileged position to produce the popping tension.

A Ha-Ha Hairuct
Critics have focused in on the sunk-eyed Spaniard Chigurh as a new classic figure of menace: a psycho killer in real-time, the violence the more brutal because it isn’t shot as slow-mo curio. A Terminator with an unfathomable air of brutality—able to transfer tension into an unfurling peanut wrapper—and idiomatic morals, he tells a storeowner, after coin-flipping for his life, to place the coin “not in your pocket where it’ll get mixed in with the others and become just a coin, which it is.” Even these words summoned from some funereal chamber of his chest are fraught with foreshadowed violence.

Like Psycho and Touch of Evil before it, No Country features memorable motel sequences at wayside, lonely motels; in fact, the Coens orchestrate a new overture of motel terror, with much of the film’s aggressive action occurring between motel walls. Without replicating Hithcock’s sexual fetishism, the Coens nevertheless capture his tension-building editing style (under their editing alias Roderick Jaynes) while adding their own flavor: a keen awareness of proper tense (conscious changes to past tense when speaking of the dead), an artful, exquisite detailing of morbidity such as the screeching, scuttling sounds of a life’s expiration, and a never-celebratory nor mournful grammar towards violence and death (the film just moves on).

A film of spoke-when-spoken-to characters, it lays down an uneasy quiet alongside the sound of a ubiquitous wind. The should-be Texas simple life that is shattered by violence is also infused with tension established via the stomping boots and staggered shotgun bursts of Carter Burwell’s subliminal score (“tone compositions, mostly sine and sawtooth waves and singing bowls” he sounds). Equally laudable is cinematographer Roger Deakins’ crisp car-front cameras, his dark and dreary Southwest towns and his brown-yellow-green hues of stripped-down Texas spaces. The easy naturalism allows one’s focus to shift to the Coens’ stripping of violence to its rigorous roots of choice and chance.

Humdrum Rumblings in Brooklyn

Like the antiquated singsong that lulls the dramatic scenes to melodrama, We Own the Night is an old-fashioned film that flaunts its pedigree. With a rocky three reels—a solid enough third-in-thirteen-years endeavor from James Gray—the film features a few peaks of originality, but too many valleys of predictability. The performances are across the board attuned to their own induced rhythms that never take the audience anywhere. The chase sequence carries a tiptop tension with its ambulating ambient sound of windshield wipes and pitpat rain-- and, being next to the El, a stylistic lineage from The French Connection-- never picks up any momentum, geared perhaps towards maintaining an even keel. A typical gallant good-guys of America versus Eastern bloc bad guys— in what else but drugs— the film tightens tension in its tenacity towards dramatic arch only to relinquish the reins to sift and sort through repercussions that never carry weight. Like the character reversals, We Own the Night is a twain entity, part tense thriller, part psychological meandering. But if anything the film remains like a rolling stone, gathering its own moss without realizing its inherent dullness and predictable path.