Dan's Papers - December 14, 2007 - Guy-Jean de Fraumeni's Hollywood in the Hamptons

Fractured Fairy Tales, the title of Jay Ward's priceless animated cartoon series, serves well as a descriptive subtitle for I'm Not There, Todd Haynes' creative take on Bob Dylan, inspired by his life and music. Dylan's life really is a fairy tale - here's a Jewish teenager growing up in the Eisenhower Era in constricted Minnesota. He was named Robert Zimmerman but obviously it ill-suited him. Instead, he adopted the name of the brilliant Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, I imagine to more readily identify with the strain of genius he must have known was running through his small frame. He then took on the singing persona of the Oklahoma dustbowl Troubadour Woody Guthrie. Well armed, he wheedled and strummed his way into the blossoming folk music scene in New York. It must be genius. His odd, impossible-to-figure-out personality, so youthful and green, sparked the perceived connection within him to withering farmlands fading into a lost heartbreaking past.

It's a real fairy tale. In his early 20s, Bob Dylan was rushing forward from folk and songs of protest to rock n' roll and rhythm and blues. He seems to have been carried along to that crash point where Folk song ease crunches into the intense frenzy-feeding scream of celebrity culture. He changes from blue denim work shirts to rhinestone, rockstar get-ups. His development was skilled and charismatic because his musical abilities were. Adept at re-channeling a wide variety of American music he never was thought of as the interpreter, he was where it began and ended.

Why is I'm Not There a fractured fairy tale? It is because the filmmaker has exploded the myth of the typical Hollywood bio pic as an admiring-adoring chronology of the artist's lives. Instead, he has broken up Dylan's persona into six not-so-easy pieces. Dylan is portrayed by six actors, none of which are named Dylan or Zimmerman. They're not even all musicians but they do represent the milestones in Dylan's musical life. One is a puberty glowing African-American, a new talent, Marcus Carl Franklin. Christian Bale is the Greenwich Village performer, Jack. Two others are portrayed by Australians, the amazing Cate Blanchett (who startlingly appears more like Dylan than the others) and Heath Ledger. Richard Gere represents the Hollywood Dylan stint. A young British actor Ben Whishaw is also in the mix of characters in for Dylan including a poet, Arthur Rimbaud. The director also carries his rebus style puzzle, mix and match, techniques into a variety of film stocks, color and black and white, editing switches and story lines that change from downright puzzling to disarmingly in your face, outspoken. Who and where is Bob Dylan? As the film's title tells us, he's not there. What's there is his music and it is front and center. Isn't that what is the artist? Not the celebrity gossip and hype, certainly. What Haynes does is have the music evoke the artist's life. That's where any truth can be.

I'm Not There deals with high stake cards, in the freewheeling passionate world of obsession, the Fans. Through all of Dylan's shifting mini-eras, the Fans were there as pretend owner-managers of the Dylan phenomenon. Oh, when he switched from acoustic to electric guitar! Again, however, Dylan was not there to defend it. He was, as always, in his own self. Though he was adept at channeling influences as they came, it was always built on Dylan's contradictions. Dylan was a maze of contradictions and a haze of smoke (yes, Camel straight cigarettes) and mirrors (as Dylan sees himself in others). As a black "Woodie Guthrie" played by young Carl Franklin, he's given warm advice - "Live in your own time." He took that to heart but was always dwelling in the dusty Guthrie agrarian west. Bale, as "Jack," shakes off Minnesota hay seeds and conquers NYC. Blanchett's "Jude" careens through swinging London's 1960s. Ledger's "Robbie" marries and when it crumbles into piweces, manages to jigsaw the pieces into a new picture. Gere as "Billy the Kid" is Dylan's Sam Peckinpah movie acting audition. Winshaw's "Arthur Rimbaud has his Dylan battling with an interviewer. Bale makes another incarnation as "Pastor Jack," a born-again Christian. Of course, in passing, you'll have no difficulty recognizing Julianne Moore as Joan Baez who was betrayed by the fellow she helped. David Cross is a good, hairy, Allen Ginsberg and Charlotte Gainsboro is Dylan's first wife, Sara. So where is Bob Dylan?

He's there, alright, in this creative collage biography. Don't worry that he's in there so deeply you'll have to dig and, keep digging in the future. That is a real plus. Its' buried incandescence continues to burn.

Guy-Jean de Fraumeni is the producer, writer, and director of award winning European and American Feature Films. He has been a judge at major Film and TV award competitions, including the Oscars, the Emmy's and various film festivals. Sarah Halsey assists him.