I'm Not There (Dylan/Haynes Film)

onetet

This is the new Todd Haynes movie inspired by Bob Dylan with many different actors (and actresses) of different ages and races playing Bob Dylan.It's not often I hate a movie so much it actually makes me angry. This was one of those movies. I remember when the project was announced thinking "I like Bob Dylan and I like Todd Haynes, but I can't imagine their aesthetics matching up very well." Turns out they don't. At all. I walked out of there thinking that Todd Haynes knows nothing about Bob Dylan, nothing about the 1960s, nothing about where we as a country are politically or culturally right now, and to boot has lost all his aesthetic powers in a big way. Some of the actors tried really hard, and I found myself thinking about how based on his past work they trusted him to come up with something compelling from this strange concept. Honestly, if I were one of them I would feel like I got stabbed in the back.As a point of comparison, I'd offer Velvet Goldmine. I think that movie was a mess, but an enjoyable mess. Haynes clearly understands "glam" as a cultural moment reasonably well, the gender-bending of that scene coincides with his own sensibility very well and the glitzy, indulgent excesses of that film are at least consistent with the glitzy, indulgent excesses of that era. Or also Far From Heaven... Haynes not only "gets" Douglas Sirk, but also gets Fassbinder doing Sirk and ways in which Fassbinder and Sirk both informed his ability to be an openly queer filmmaker at the turn of millenia. Here I don't have a clue what Haynes was thinking, other than maybe "jeez, with Iraq and bearded hipsters and all that we as a society seem to be referencing the 60s more and more. Maybe I should do that, too!" Visually, this highly stylized movie could not be more trite; it's another period piece in which the set and costume designers were given either too much control or too little direction, so as a result every person in every scene is rocking too-perfect outfits that scream "This is 1962." "Okay, now it's 1965!" etc etc And at times, when Haynes runs out of (bad) visual ideas, he reverted to a teenager in art school and tossed in midgets, giraffes and clowns... presumably in the hope that here and there a clueless film critic or hipster neophyte will go "DUDE! This movie is so freaking weird. I ain't never seen a midget and a clown in the same place. I have to tell everyone to go see this brave, ambitious, extraordinary and dare I say Fellini-esque motion picture!" It is also filled with incredibly retrograde and arguably racist and classist stereotypes about African-Americans and Appalachian "simple folk."I was somewhat disappointed with Control, but that's a work of genius by comparion. At the very least that film stuck with me a for a few days and made me spend some time listening to Joy Division's music and thinking about that band's significance. This one'll likely have my Dylan records collecting dust for months. In fact, I think I need a shower...