REVIEW: I’M NOT THERE

Dir: Todd Haynes, 2007

KUHU TANVIR

Figure 1 Cate Blanchett in I'm Not There

The opening shot of Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There is strikingly reminiscent of D.A. Pennebaker’s 1965 documentary Don’t Look Back. Pennebaker’s camera followed Bob Dylan incessantly—into hotel rooms, parties, press conferences, green-rooms, on the road and on the stage— and it seemed like the film was the closest we could get to a celebrity. It was, but much happened to Dylan after the Tour of England that Pennebaker voyeuristically shot him and his friends on—he became the stuff of legend, the symbol of a generation. And how do you make a biopic of an age, a generation‌

Bob Dylan is the perfect example of the ideological graph of United States of America around the Vietnam War, and it is this constantly changing, difficult to grasp, characteristic of Dylan that Haynes portrays in I’m Not There. Six characters, none of them called Bob or Dylan, paint a picture of the elusive personality that was Bob Dylan. The history, influences, friends, body language, politics, music and life of Dylan are captured with these characters, but it isn’t a simple game of one person representing one quality.

Haynes throws snippets of information at us, and with every movement, every line, we unknowingly know more about Bob Dylan. Some things are literal; for instance, the young, precocious Woody’s (Marcus Carl Franklin) self-fashioned name and complete worship for Woody Guthrie, who was perhaps Dylan’s greatest and most consistent influence; Jack Rollins (Christian Bale) the singing sensation of the 60s and Robbie Clark (Heath Ledger), a reference to his stint as an actor. Some are more interpretive, like the connections with the rebel and the recluse Henry McCarty (Billy the Kid, played by Richard Gere) and French poet Arthur Rimbaud (Ben Whishaw). Some are details, Cate Blanchett playing Jude Quinn, the character who looks closest to the performer Dylan as most remember him, highlighting the somewhat feminine look that he had in his younger days.

Haynes plays with the biopic mode, just as Dylan played with music, forcing people out of the comfort of melody, or in the Haynes’ case, of chronology and identity. He mixes genres, and the end result is a post-modernist trip between conventional story-telling modes and the dream-like. Whether the dream-like sequences are a reference to Dylan’s drugged imagination, his innermost and sometimes destructive desires or simply one of Haynes’ explorations, is a question we are invited to deliberate upon. Haynes moves from colour to black & white, from fiction to documentary, from one character to other, not letting the viewer settle into anything, which is, once again, a reminder of Dylan’s character, who, by public admission, refused to be categorized, famously saying, “All I can do is be me whoever that is.”

The other game Haynes plays is of verisimilitude in parts and complete contrast in others. Take Woody for instance, though a character based rather obviously on Dylan’s young days, Haynes picks a young black boy for the role. On the other hand, both Blanchett and Bale are made, very consciously, to resemble Dylan. Haynes even recreates a few events and people in Dylan’s life as they’ve been reported (most popularly by Matrin Scorcese in No Direction Home). For instance, the scene when Quinn performs first with the electronic guitar and the Pete Seeger figure runs to cut the wires, is based on a true event. Similarly with the character of Alice Fabian (Julianne Moore), Haynes goes that extra mile to replicate iconic photos of Dylan and Joan Baez together in concert, with pictures of Moore and Bale (who plays Jack Rollins). It all boils down to ‘what is’, and ‘what can be, if you really think about it’: in other words, a play between the tenuous concept of fact, and the more flexible one of interpretation.

One of the most unique things about I’m Not There is its relationship with the two previous films about Bob Dylan – Don’t Look Back and No Direction Home. Haynes’ film has evidence of dependence on these films to an extent, and yet in the treatment of I’m Not There, there is an indulgent sort of irony directed towards them. For every truth claim of these films, given the involvement of ‘the people themselves’, I’m Not There responds with exaggerated figures (Cate Blanchett as the swaggering, caricatured Quinn) or interpretations (Ben Whishaw as Arthur Rimbaud sans the French, looking and speaking like Dylan), while delivering as much, if not more information.

The actors, the structure, the visuals and naturally, the music make I’m Not There one of the most thought-provoking films in long time. It is as much a revelation to the children of the 80s, as to the original admirers of Bob Dylan – Poet. Prophet. Rebel. Judas.

About Author: Kuhu Tanvir is one of the editors of Wide Screen. She currently works as a film critic for NDTVMovies.com, an Indian cinema website. Kuhu has an M.A in English Literature from St. Stephen's College, University of Delhi. She has previously worked for The First City Theatre Foundation and worked on the Festival Bulletin at the 9th Osian's Cinefan Festival of Asian and Arab Cinema. Her areas of interest include realism, fantasy and portrayals of the Holocaust in cinema.