An Early Review from the Toronto Intl. Film Fest

I must admit to being more than a little relieved that I'm Not There is far from the blunderfuck the local reviews I briefly scanned made it out to be.  In fact, as I see it, no better movie about Dylan could possibly be made.  Little wonder that the legend himself agreed immediately at the conceptual stage to allowed his music to be a part of the movie, a genuine rarity - And! gave complete artistic control to the director.

Blanchett is perfectly cast and spot on.  Julianne Moore, who previously worked with director Todd Haynes in Far From Heaven, is just peachy as a Baez clone.  The other manifestations are really well done too, especially Marcus Carl Franklin as Dylan/Guthrie. Spectacular cinematography.  Like Oh Brother Where Art Thou? meets A Clockwork Orange. Clever, witty dialogue. 

Just about every conceptual move works splendidly, especially the reinterpretation of Dylan's first wife Sarah as Claire, a French artist.  And events minor and major are often subject to very persuasive new angles.  New for me, at least, but then I've not read any biographies, just listened to stories from those who have and taken in much of Don't Look Back and the Scorsese doc.  I'll never again think of Donovan as the main target of Ballad of a Thin Man.  And I simply can't believe that the importance of Kennedy's assassination had never occurred or been relayed to me.  My one small qualm is with the presentation of When the Ship Comes In, one of my very favorite songs of all time, in a sort of private minstrel show like situation, a far remove from the introduction to King on the Washington Mall in No Direction Home.

No doubt, it's a movie for insiders.  Or for those interested in becoming so.  And one that begs to be watched again and again.  But if this flick can't satisfy movie critics and popular audiences, so be it.  A bona fide Dylan picture never will.

Comments

[Matt]

Oh but it's got the perfect title...and that is no better song to be finally, officially released; I think that's great. Of course v. curious to see how it relates to the biographies, both "comprehensive" and "pointed"-like; thanks.

[Matt]

(Someone should really upload that song and add it to the post. ((I would if my computer were not stolen.))

[Matt]

Weird

[Matt]

Interwebs' lyrics (contradicting the ones I once transcribed in college, fwiw).

[Matt]

From today, a DailyKos diary:

A friend and neighbor in Brooklyn had an old reel-to-reel machine, and so I sat in Jimmy Verona's apartment one night drinking beer and listening to the song over and over, trying to decipher the lyrics. One legendary aspect of the song, you must realize, is that some of the lyrics are not even words. Dylan never actually finished the song, so in parts he sang slurred syllables that took the place of unwritten lyrics.

The kicker was that I had no way to make a copy of the song, so after that one night of listening, I returned the borrowed tape and that was that. I'd heard it, I didn't grasp it all, and it was gone. It would be more than ten years before I'd hear the song again, on the 5-CD bootleg set The Genuine Basement Tapes. In the past decade, I've listened to the song now and then, and it's still dark and mysterious, the decipherable lyrics resolutely opaque even as the slurred syllables resonate with a strange tension. What's he saying? What's it mean? Who knows, but it's somehow a beautiful song.

And now the New York Times Magazine offhandedly drops this weird little bombshell that "Dylan's people" had "accidentally" given "the master recording" of the song to Neil Young in 1968.

That could possibly make sense, but it seems highly unlikely. Copies of songs from what would become known as The Basement Tapes had been distributed within the music business as demos in 1968. And a number of artists released versions of some of the songs, including "Too Much of Nothing," "I Shall Be Released," and "You Ain't Goin' Nowhere." But it seems really odd that a demo version of "I'm Not There," which has always been believed to be unfinished, would have been prepared as a demo.

And it's equally strange that it would have been given, even by accident, to Neil Young in 1968, at the time when he was exiting the band Buffalo Springfield and was concentrating on his own material. Perhaps it happened, but it sure seems odd.

Is there a completed version of "I'm Not There" that was provided, even by accident, as a demo? And if the song is finished, and it's not the version with Dylan at times slurring mysterious syllables instead of singing actual lyrics, doesn't that ruin the whole mystique of the song? And wouldn't the existence of a finished version of the song actually undermine the concept of using the song as the title of Hayne's film?

Finally, one more thing about this sounds bizarre for technical reasons. The magazine article mentions that Neil Young's office "e-mailed" the master recording. People e-mail MP3s all the time. Not long ago I even e-mailed an MP3 of "I'm Not There" to a friend. But a lossless version of a master recording, something of the quality that you'd want to use in a film, would be a very big file to e-mail. And since the original recording from the summer of 1967 would be on analog tape anyway, wouldn't the film company want the actual tape so they could make their own transfer to digital? This makes the story seem all the more peculiar.

And that brings to mind a possible explanation: it has been known for years that Neil Young has been preparing his own archival box set, so he must have assembled a studio where he could play vintage tapes and master them digitally. Perhaps Dylan's people, in recent times, have passed along some of Dylan's old master tapes so Neil's engineers could do the same mastering to them.

[McChesters]

ah yeah: also check out "Positively Canberra Street" on Blood on the Shekels. Sheer lyrical intensity, man: Rimbaud like meets Harpo-Marx

This review certainly hits something:

Because Todd Haynes's Dylan film isn't about Dylan. That's what's going to be so difficult for people to understand. That's what's going to make ''I'm Not There'' so trying for the really diehard Dylanists. That's what might upset the non-Dylanists, who may find it hard to figure out why he bothered to make it at all. And that's why it took Haynes so long to get it made. Haynes was trying to make a Dylan film that is, instead, what Dylan is all about, as he sees it, which is changing, transforming, killing off one Dylan and moving to the next, shedding his artistic skin to stay alive. The twist is that to not be about Dylan can also be said to be true to the subject Dylan. ''These so-called connoisseurs of Bob Dylan music, I don't feel they know a thing or have any inkling of who I am or what I'm about,'' Dylan himself told an interviewer in 2001. ''It's ludicrous, humorous and sad that such people have spent so much of their time thinking about who? Me? Get a life please. . . . You're wasting you own.'' It might sound like a parlor game, or like cheating on Haynes's part, but to make sense in a film about Dylan would make no sense. ''If I told you what our music is really about, we'd probably all get arrested,'' Dylan once said.

[old]

very well put, though, perhaps I'm not a diehard dylanist enough cause I found it to be very much about dylan, both at a level of detail (even if patently fictionalized facts - it seems more like 'some names and events have been altered to protect the innocent' at times) and in the sense of recapitulating what Dylan is all about by killing off one Dylan after another. On that note, isn't it about time that Dylan kill off his current incarnation?!

[Matt]

I disagreee. The pupa stage gets all the glory, but this, his imago, is generously human and unique...nonpareil. His ability to remain gentle, humble and open, with of course the necessary grains of salt, is, I sometimes think, remarkable. People still looking for the revolutionary at this stage are just delusional. Not necessarily you, old. But that desire even smacks at times of wanting others to perform otherness, writ large, perpetually as spectacle-a demand so familiar and tired to him that it's possible he is overcompensating in reaction to it (and has been for decades). Not that there isn't room for compromise, or some real creative work, in other words. Probably one could read the radio shows either direction, depending on the wind...In a sense they are (politically) conservative, nostalgic on the side of sentimentalism, but to ignore the...love, humor and (historical) wonder of them would be equally silly...

Latin, pupa, a puppet, original meaning apparently "a young girl".

(Fitting description for the Blanchett phase, maybe.)

[McChesters]

Blanchett is perfectly cast and spot on.

Eh. Spot on look and mannerisms, mebbe; spot off voice. Sort of like Schecky Green meets er ROSE MARIE? Sheer lyrical intensity, tho' man, simmering with the visions of like Brautigan....Boxcar Willie........