Otilia (Anamaria Marinca) contemplates the price she has already paid
for helping her roommate obtain an abortion

If you saw Christian Mungiu’s masterful, if harrowing, 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days in the theater and haven’t had a chance to catch it on DVD – it just came out – I recommend that you get hold of the little round platter just so that you can see the few extras burned onto the disc. If you haven’t yet seen it, I recommend that you do that now & return to this discussion later, for much of what follows will contain spoilers. There is a discussion that moves toward poetics in the last five paragraphs – beginning with “In a sense…” – that can be read separately.

4 luni, as it might be abbreviated in its original Romanian, is the tale of a college student who helps her roommate obtain an illegal abortion during the last days of the (big C) Communist Ceauşescu regime in 1987. One of the most repressive & financially exhausted of all Soviet bloc countries, Romania was a nation with a police state infrastructure that routinely depended on the black market for many, if not most, of the items of daily life. For a student able to obtain quantities of western cigarettes, coffee, shampoo or milk powder, the black market is an easy way through college. For those buying, it’s all about who you know, who they send you to, waiting around for each & ever item – one didn’t shop for pleasure under Communism. If daily life was a hell of waiting under the old regime¹, obtaining something that was dangerous & illegal was much harder.

For his police state, his cult of personality & his laws against abortion, the citizens of Romania let Nicolae Ceauşescu feel their displeasure. He & his wife were shot to death by firing squad on Christmas Day, 1989. The prohibition against abortions during the first 14 weeks of pregnancy did not last out the week.

I’m not going to recount the film’s narrative fully here, other than to note that this is a film all anti-abortion activists should see, since it shows in painful details what occurs when the procedure is illegal. And it’s one film that all volunteers at Planned Parenthood should see as an in-service training, not just to remind themselves why they put up with the bullshit of picket lines & death threats (and on occasion far worse), but also why every abortion itself is a tragedy of bad choices & poor planning, & why it’s so important to get contraceptive tools & information distributed far more widely than they are today. In 4 Months, the traditional risks of illegal abortion – arrest, death – are skirted, in part because the main characters are all educated people in their early 20s. Imagine this same film with 13-year-olds & the movie you get is a far cry from Juno.

But what interests me here are some decisions writer / producer / director Mongiu made in putting together this film, which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes & earned him a gold medal from the current president of a still impoverished Romania. The first is the absence of music, which appears only toward the end of the film’s credits. The second are the obvious dramatic threads that are picked up & left hanging, most notably a sequence in which Otilia surreptitiously picks through the abortionist’s bag & steals a knife, an item that foretells all manner of bad endings but never otherwise is used dramatically in the film (I think she notices it again much later, but does so I think just so we recall its presence). Mongiu discusses these in one of the most intelligent director interviews I’ve seen among the added features. In real life, Mongiu argues, life isn’t accompanied by a sound track, things occurs for which there is no closure, experience isn’t aestheticized – to replicate this he has had to build them into the film, adding details that then don’t get followed, eschewing music, refusing to make jump cuts within scenes so as to coerce an audience’s perception of the action. The result is that the film is a series of very long takes, that often Anamaria Marinca, the amazing actress who plays Otilia, has her back turned to the camera & that actual camera shifts within scenes – as when Otilia comes into the bathroom to wash herself out after having been raped by Mr. Bebe, the abortionist – almost cause a kind of vertigo because they’re so rare. In one key scene, the characters’ faces are entirely in darkness. Often the characters are not centered (an issue if you see this in the unletterboxed DVD version) onscreen. Otilia is left waiting in Mr. Bebe’s Soviet-era automobile while he steps out to argue with his mother, who otherwise has no role in this film.

But I don’t think that the only role these elements serve is to heighten our sense of the film’s imitation of real life – I think that Mongiu is being disingenuous in the interview when he suggests this. Rather, I think he is playing quite deliberately with the audience’s well developed expectations, and that the knife in particular is an exceptionally cagey choice for just such treatment. It’s not just that it’s a detail that doesn’t go anywhere, but Mongiu knows full well that we are all waiting for it to be used, to save Gâbita, to kill Mr. Bebe, whatever. Mongiu does exactly the same thing with a remarkable dinner sequence, as Otilia & her boyfriend Adi sit silently at dinner (she’s at the table, he’s behind her, as they celebrate his mother’s 48^th birthday). With ten guests around a table that, in the U.S., would never be asked serve more than six, we can see the young couple’s alienation, from his parents & from one another, as the roomful of doctors (and doctors’ wives – Mongiu’s own parents are doctors & he was only a little younger than Adi when this story would have taken place) jabber away, a key detail being that the head of their “unit,” wherever they all work, got their not on his medical skills, but rather on his “healthy” ability to get on “in the [Communist] party”. Everyone talks, not quite at once, Otilia & Adi remain silent, the center of our screen &, with Adi’s mother, our attention. With few if any cuts, the scene took five days to film. Onscreen, it runs less than five minutes.

In a sense, Mongiu recognizes that, just as a poem is a “machine made of words,” to quote Dr. Williams, a film likewise is a “machine made of cuts & scenes” and thus has to achieve “artlessness” as a surface by building it in, not unlike the way Judy Grahn deliberately builds in artlessness to her very best (& relatively early) poems, such as “A Woman is Talking to Death” or “A Common Woman.” It isn’t inherent in the medium, whether film or poetry. Clarity, after all, isn’t a given – it’s an effect.

In the past few weeks I’ve noticed several comments, laments really, from people about the alleged “elitism” of post-avant poetics, including several comments the other day to my note contrasting flarf & conceptual poetics, but also on my nephew Daniel’s blog as well. As I noted on my links list Monday, connecting to one such complaint, it’s an argument that could have been made against some of the work of the troubadour poets in the High Middle Ages (1100 – 1350). And it’s become increasingly the case as other genres, from the novel to reality TV, have come along to absorb some of the social roles traditionally encased in the poem. The one function – the only one – that no other genre can take from poetry is its role as the art of language without limit. And in a nation in which 90 percent of the readers (and 100 percent of the editors) of the New York Review of Books are insane if they think that they’re literate, that does make poetry something that can only work for the masses under two circumstances –

♥   the poet her- or himself is capable only of a handful of surface effects (the Kooser / Collins road)

♥   the poet her- or himself makes conscious decisions to build in hooks that give the appearance of dumbing it down for the “average Joe” (the Robert Creeley / Judy Grahn / Frank O’Hara road)

One of these is, I would submit, a legitimate aesthetic choice. And one of these strikes me as having more to do with neurological pathology than it does literature. (If someone no brighter than George W. Bush wrote poetry, would Garrison Keillor think it “good”?) I think it’s clear that Mongiu’s road is that of the aesthetic choice.

A second “bonus” feature on the DVD gives us some indication as to why. One of the “benefits” of post-Communist life in Romania, a nation with twice the population of Pennsylvania, has been the destruction of its film industry. Without state sponsorship, there is little in the way of funding for films. And most of the old theaters are in commercial districts where more money can be made by putting the buildings to other uses. With a population of 22 million people – 2 million in Bucharest alone – Romania now has just three dozen cinemas. To show a film like 4 luni to Romanian audiences, some of whom have not seen a film in a theater in the 19 years since the fall of Ceauşescu, the filmmakers put together a caravan that traveled to thirty cities over one month, showing the picture in auditoriums or even on outdoor screens & walls – they brought their screen with them in addition to all the projection equipment needed for 35mm viewing, Over the month, the film reached an audience of nearly 18,000 people – a great success for Romanian cinema, but frankly pathetic numbers compared to the 5+ million tickets sold the first weekend of Sex and the City in the USA. (In fact, film caravans exist throughout Europe as an alternative means of distribution for regional – non US blockbuster – or serious cinema, the problem’s not unique to Romania, just more pronounced.)

I have always – even as a teenager – been interested in what the troubadours called trobar clus, that writing they reserved for their best readers / listeners, themselves, the origin of the sestina. I want a poetry that does the very most it can do – all of the 19 books from the Poetry Society of America contest that I really loved (I have seven still to profile here) reflect that. Some do so in terms that enable them to reach broader audiences, but others don’t avail themselves of that choice, taking what I might call the Stein / Zukofsky / Beckett / Joyce / Watten road instead. The idea that one road (the Creeley / Grahn et al road) is morally superior to the Stein et al road is, I think, defensible only – and I do mean only – if you think that the population of the US, and the other English-speaking countries, is so deeply, even permanently damaged that a truly literate art of language can never fully exist. That’s a possibility, but I’m much more of an optimist than that.

 

¹ My experiences in Russia two years later confirm this. Under Communism’s last stages, life was logistics.

”Carrie” has the arms of a weightlifter in Sex and the City

My guess is that – just speculatin’ here – I’m not exactly whom writer/director Michael Patrick King had in mind when he created the movie version of Sex and the City. But when a key member of my wife’s girl gang ended up seeing the film with her husband – which led to interesting discussions (the word “traitor” was used) – I ended up taking Krishna to see the surprisingly long version of what feels for all the world like an episode of the HBO show stretched to fit a Holiday-special time slot. As such, it’s a diverting two-and-one-half hours, but not so diverting that it kept my mind from morphing into something akin to a film anthropologist. What really is going on here?

The plot will be familiar to anyone who’s seen even a few of the shows – the gang of four (Sarah Jessica Parker as Carrie Bradshaw, a freelance writer whose topics are sex & love, Kim Cattrall as Samantha Jones, the ultimate cougar [a women whose preference is for younger men] and a longtime marketing exec, Cynthia Nixon as lawyer Miranda Hobbes & Kristin Davis as Charlotte York, a bubbly airhead whose money is strictly inherited) are all roughly ten years older than we saw them last. Two are married – Charlotte & Miranda – while the other two are in what have become longtime committed relationships, Samantha to a hunky young TV star who is shockingly nice & considerate to the partner who also serves as his manager, having moved with him to LA, and Carrie to financier Mr. Big (Law & Order’s Chris Noth). Over the course of the next 150 minutes all four women will be tested – Charlotte will get pregnant, Samantha will wonder if monogamy is all that great, Miranda leaves her marriage after her husband admits cheating (“just once”), and Carrie & Big decide to get married, then split after he gets cold feet literally at the steps to the event after Carrie has let their “little” wedding spiral out of control – full spread in Vogue, the wedding itself at the New York Public Library, the “no name” dress transforming into a Vivienne Westwood gown.

Ostensibly this film is about the choices these women make & how they resolve their issues. Yet given that three of the women are having major relationship difficulties, it’s curious that the one woman in a happy marriage, Charlotte, is the character least on view here, her husband, played by Evan Handler (whom West Wing fans will recognize as the acerbic campaign consultant with the shaved head), has almost no dialogue outside of one hospital scene after Charlotte delivers. Both Cynthia’s marriage & Carrie’s wedding collapse after the husband makes a critical mistake & Samantha finds her goody-two-shoes telly star isn’t enough to keep her from longing after her neighbor, Dante, who is wont to have trysts with different women every day (the curtains are always open) and who likes to shower on his back porch. Particularly after her beau has to work late on Valentine’s Day while Cattrall lies waiting for him dressed in nothing but homemade sushi (“places where wasabi has no right to go”).

So the men give the women an excuse to opt out, which three of them do, and they’re all there for each other (save for a curious subplot regarding Miranda and Carrie’s betrothed), then two of them learn little lessons about forgiveness & all’s well that end’s well. There’s another little tale-within-the-tale involving a personal assistant to Carrie, portrayed by Jennifer Hudson, who does seem to handle these film cameos with great élan. But that’s basically it for two-and-a-half hours.

So what takes so much time? First, it seems to be harder to introduce characters whom 98 percent of the audience already knows than it would have been on their own – the first 30 minutes of this film are really awkward & slow, so that it’s all uphill from there. Second, the main narrative arc – Big & Carrie finding “the perfect apartment” (it’s a penthouse) gives them time to contemplate making over the shell of a unit (the object of desire here is a closet) & Carrie has to decide what to take & what to pitch after 20 years in her previous place, which occasions much trying on of vintage wear. Then the run up to the wedding takes a great deal of time as every little item suddenly gets bigger, from the dress (from a “no name” dress to high art couture), to the location (the aforementioned NYPL), to the guest list – 75 to over 200. Somewhere in there is a trip to Fashion Week – I’m not kidding – and we get to see one collection its entirety. Not to mention the Vogue shoot. Finally there is the item that drew the loudest and most awed gasps from the audience I saw the film with in Plymouth Meeting, PA, the closest thing in this film to pure porn – the redesigned walk-in closet, larger than a lot of New York apartments.

This is a film all about surfaces & labels – indeed, it admits as much in the very first sentence of Carrie’s voiceover at the start of the film – “young women come to New York in search of the two Ls, labels & love.” And it’s intriguing, actually, that the quartet are all (save maybe for Charlotte) allowed to show their age. There are moments here when Carrie, Miranda & Samantha all look quite tired, even haggard & scenes in which Sarah Jessica Parker’s neck, her arms & her knees may well make her cringe, in spite of the fact that she obviously puts a lot of time in at the gym. In fact, each is much more interesting when they're not being beautiful and that may be the point (also why it’s the airhead who’s not included in this). There are several scenes later in the film that are nothing but shots of Carrie, her hair dyed a darker brown, looking pensive, like any woman in her forties contemplating the question of age in a society that is so heavily marketed to the young.

Which is why, I suspect, that only one of the couples thinks about therapy – Miranda & her philandering ex-. If you have to choose between psychology & shoes, the Sex and the City franchise will opt always for the latter, even as it knows, in the pit of its guilty stomach, that the former really is more important. In a film that is all about surfaces, it’s difficult to create a tale of insight. Perhaps this is why the decision of Miranda & Steve to meet midway on the Brooklyn Bridge if they’ve decided to put his affair & her rigid punishing ways behind them seems so terribly hokey. Not to mention Carrie & Big’s romantic reunion in the closet. Or why the decision of Samantha to move back to New York & return to her role as constant sexual predator isn’t commented on at all, even as they celebrate her 50^th birthday.

It would be interesting actually – I mean this in a completely serious way – to revisit this quartet again in ten years & just maybe another time ten years after that, not unlike Michael Apted’s Up film series (the last episode of which was 49 Up after following the same real people since they were seven). At what moment, do you think, does life become about something more than shoes given who these people are? Will Samantha ever contract a serious STD? Or figure out that her lifestyle, the female equivalent of Joe Namath or Wilt Chamberlain, is itself terribly lonely? At what moment will 25-year-old men stop responding? Will Miranda ever get beyond being uptight? Perhaps as a judge? Will parenting turn Charlotte into an adult? The whole text of age would be interesting to explore with this set of characters, but it’s not clear to me that the makers – its primary writers have always been men, Darren Star on the TV series & King here – have the intellectual perspective to make it work.

Seeing Sex and the City the same weekend that Hillary Clinton finally withdrew from the presidential race gave this film’s overlaps with feminist subtexts a sharper edge than they might have had some other time. This is, after all, a franchise that shows women as successful and superficial all at once, a contradiction it never fully owns or explores, tho it does seem from time to time to be conscious of its presence. Clinton’s candidacy was sunk more by her vote on Iraq & poor planning – ignoring the caucus states will live in infamy as Mark Penn’s dumbest move – than it was by the continual misogyny of cable news & others (try to imagine a black stereotype piece of merchandise equivalent to the Hillary Clinton nutcracker!) but that misogyny was a constant irritant & has, I think, rubbed a lot of people quite raw over the past several months. I’m not convinced, frankly, that Sex and the City itself is free of such misogyny, even as it markets itself as the ultimate female guilty pleasure.

You’re always aware that the hierarchies here are in place. Not just as in label versus no-label, but even among the actresses. Parker never disrobes (to the degree that in the final love-in-a-closet climax, the two are lying on the shag rug fully clothed afterwards, their hair perfectly in place), while it is Nixon who has the hot sex scene with everything out there for the audience to see. It’s Cattrall under all those California rolls & we even catch a glimpse of a Kristin Davis nipple in a brief love scene. It all reinforces the hierarchies that are in place elsewhere not just in this movie, but in society with regards to women. There is a scene in which personal assistant Hudson is given a Louis Vutton purse by Carrie, so that she can return to St. Louis a success because she got a name purse! Is that what African American women want? Somehow I have my doubts.

Llewelyn and the satchel

Okay. No Country for Old Men finally made it to DVD & I got it from Netflix right away, watching it twice in the same evening, once with Krishna who gave up shortly after the first coin toss scene because it was too violent & creepy, once with my son Jesse, just to make sure I wasn’t missing something.¹ My sense after the second viewing was that, yes, it was a good film, tho not a great one & hardly the best I’d seen made in the past year. Not only was it not better than There Will Be Blood, it was a steep step downwards from It’s Not Me, Once, Into the Wild or The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Maybe even Juno. Among Coen brother projects, I’d put it somewhere around The Man Who Wasn’t There, a good little flick with lots to look at, but also deeply flawed.

Well Hollywood has been known to give the Best Picture Oscar to lesser films before, whether to a bon-bon like Shakespeare in Love when Saving Private Ryan was sitting right next to it, or to real dogs like Chicago, Out of Africa or, the most feral of all pooch pics, Rocky. No Country isn’t in the canine category, but still it makes you wonder. I know that a lot of the Academy’s voters are older & no longer really active in the industry, tho I would have expected them to react not unlike my wife to this updated version of The Missouri Breaks, the Arthur Penn-Marlon Brando-Jack Nicholson fiasco that attempted to construct a film around violence the way a porn director paces sex scenes (or did at least before the web wiped out the big budget XXX-travaganzas). This felt instead more like a remake of Blood Simple, the debut flick the Coen brothers made over 20 years ago. Tho Blood Simple won Best Picture at the Independent Spirit Award (& it won at Sundance the year before), it wasn’t even nominated for an Oscar.² Maybe the voters this were feeling guilty for only giving the truly gifted Coen brothers one Best Picture for Fargo. After all, they’d passed on everything from The Hudsucker Proxy to The Big Lebowski to Brother, Oh Wherefore Art Thou. You can’t say the Coen boys weren’t due.

A large part of the reason that No Country didn’t work for me was Tommy Lee Jones, one of the finest actors around. In fact, that was precisely the problem. I have seen Jones in so many movies & in so many roles – including the In the Valley of Elah for which he was deservedly nominated for Best Actor – that the sheriff of rather limited intellect just doesn’t come off right. If you listen to his lines & look at his actions in the film, this guy is no bright light. He never catches anybody & doesn’t seem even clued in to the important detail that there are multiple sets of villains after Llewelyn’s ass for absconding with the suitcase with $2 million after he comes across a drug deal turned “OK Corral” in the Texas desert somewhere around Marfa in the year 1980. Sheriff Bell might even had led Llewelyn’s poor little Carla Jean to her doom just by not understanding the nature of the threat. All he does is ride around to squint at the aftermath & pontificate – which he does a lot. To his addled deputy Wendell, to Carla Jean, to a lawman down in El Paso³, finally to a half-crazed paraplegic relative who’s gone from lawman to cat herder himself out there in the desert. Only Sheriff Bell’s wife appears not be buying any, but she’s not enough to keep Jones’ folksiness from turning him into Yoda with a ten-gallon hat. That’s not who Jones wants to be, but it’s who we got.

In a sense, Sheriff Bell should be the most interesting part of this film’s structure. He is the counterpoint, the non-psychopath, the minimalist who doesn’t even draw his gun when he & Wendell first enter Llewelyn’s trailer. Both Javier Bardem’s sociopathic Anton Chigurh and Josh Brolin’s wannabe tough-guy Llewelyn are maximalists – they will do anything to accomplish their goal. A lot of the film is nothing more than watching this excess at work. Like getting across the border with no clothes on. Like the coin-tossing scene, friendo. It has no narrative function whatsoever other than to let us linger awhile watching Chigurh toy with life & death, so that later we will understand the implications when the accountant asks Chigurh “Are you going to kill me?” and Bardem responds, “Well, that depends. Can you see me?” We know without watching what comes next. Ditto the scene at the end with Carla Jean, Chigurh checking his boots on the front porch on his way out for any bloodstains they might have picked up.

Those moments of carnage implied but not shown are part of No Country’s shapeliness & this is a film that cares deeply just how good it looks – like with the cloud over the desert when Llewelyn is aiming at the deer right before he finds the trucks. Or Chigurh’s picking his boots up off the floor and resting them against the bed in the hotel so that Carson Wells’ blood doesn’t sully them while Chigurh chats with Llewelyn on the phone.

Which is why the editing at the Sands motel comes across as so patchwork. There is no reason to show us Chigurh hiding in the shadows as Sheriff Bell enters the crime scene motel room and not to have him kill Bell other than the realization that audiences might not get it from just the unscrewed air vent alone that Chigurh is now the one with the money (the boys on the bikes later comment on the size of the bill he offers for a shirt). Clearly it was the Mexicans who took care of Llewelyn, leaving one of their own dead outside the motel room they never got into, leaving Chiguhr to stroll in knowing right where the money would be hidden. This sequence is so clumsy that it jumps out as possibly a last-minute edit. But even with it, I had to watch the film twice to extract everything that was going on.

In a film that is as controlled as this – I wondered if that cloud was a CGI effect, in fact – such cringe-inducing moments are truly curious. Afterwards, I kept wondering who might have done a better job as Sheriff Bell – Bob Duvall is too obvious – someone whose challenged logic wouldn’t come across as shorthand for wisdom. Then I realized that the choice was obvious all along. There is only one human being truly believable as the kind of bumpkin the Coen brothers want to invoke, and that’s the original: George W. Bush.

 

¹ In fact, I had. I had not gotten the first time through just who killed Llewelyn & who got the money – that whole sequence at the El Paso Desert Sands motel went by too fast for me, especially with that one gaping edit there at the end.

² Platoon beat out Hannah and Her Sisters, Children of a Lesser God, The Mission and Room with a View.

³ Who gets stuck with the film’s worst lines, complaining about “green hair and bones in their nose” of today’s youth. Really? In 1980 El Paso? Unlikely.

The most successful actor in film history is the late John Cazale. He made five full-length motion pictures, every one of which is a film classic: the first two Godfather films, The Conversation, The Deer Hunter and Dog-Day Afternoon. The last of these finds Cazale, best known for his role as sad sack mobster Fredo Corleone, playing a bank robber opposite, of all people, Al Pacino. Based on a true story of a bank job gone wrong – the cops quickly surround the bank, but there are hostages & Pacino’s character turns out to be a natural with the crowd that soon gathers – Sidney Lumet’s best movie¹ plays not just with any memory we might have of the event itself on the evening news, but with our expectations of film genres as it gradually becomes clear why Pacino is robbing a bank – to pay for his lover’s sex change operation.

I thought of Dog-Day Afternoon last night as I was watching The Bank Job, which, although it is also about the robbery of a bank with unintended consequences, is a very different movie than Afternoon in all respects but one – just how much it plays with the audience’s sense of expectation. The Bank Job claims to be the account of an actual event – there’s not a lot of documentation for this, tho that may be because of official British secrecy – in which a local group of petty thieves are persuaded to dig into a bank vault that just happens to contain compromising photographs of the late Princess Margaret. Safety deposit boxes being what they are, there are a lot of other incriminating things to be had along with several million dollars in currency, jewelry & trinkets. Soon, everyone who has something to lose is searching for Our Gang.

What The Bank Job really asks is what would a franchise like Oceans 11, 12, 13 look like if, in actuality, their elaborate heists were in any way real. The answer is that not everybody lives to tell the tale. As presented in this deliberately unwieldy plot, the initiators are not just concerned with protecting the Princess’ reputation, but with the fact that Michael X, a black power advocate – in reality a pimp & drug dealer – has them & thus is beyond the reach of the law. But a local madam also keeps her photos of customers – including MPs & other government officials – in a box, and the local porn merchant keeps his books there with records of which cops are being paid off, how much, & by whom. The MPs & the cops – both the ones on the take & a certain officer Givens who is not – also have an interest in this project. As does even the undercover agent who has slept her way into the black power advocate’s entourage.

The first half of the film is very much a poor man’s Oceans XX, as Terry, played effectively by Jason Statham, a good character actor with looks that are just borderline leading man (imagine a younger & serious Bruce Willis), scrambles to put together a team after having been recruited by Martine Love (Saffron Burrows, whom Boston Legal fans will recognize as Lorraine Wellers), an old flame who, unbeknownst to him, has been busted for trying to ferret drugs in from Morroco. Two of Terry’s team come from his own garage, which specializes in the resale of stolen vehicles. To these are added a front man – they have to rent a nearby shop in order to have somewhere to dig from – in the person of a con artist turned men’s clothing salesman – and someone who knows about digging tunnels, a local Cypriot immigrant. Finally, when they get ready to dig, they decide they need somebody as a lookout & turn again to Terry’s garage, picking up the junior mechanic who has just married the bookkeeper. His job is to stay on top of a nearby building with a walkie talkie and keep them apprised of anything going on outside the bank.

Needless to say, much goes on, even tho the bank is closed all weekend. Not the least is a local ham radio operator who overhears the walkie talkie and soon has the cops in his bedroom listening in, trying to figure out just which bank is being targeted. I’m not going to recount what happens next here – the Wikipedia plot summary is over 1250 words long, and needs every one of them. I’m more interested here in two things. One is the narrative structure of undercutting genre expectations. The other is the role of truth claims in an otherwise genre flick.

Obviously the two questions are related. Director Roger Donaldson (Species, Dante’s Peak, The Recruit) and writers Dick Clement & Ian La Frenais (Across the Universe) flood the latter half of the film with so many threads of “X is out to get Y” that it is all but impossible to tell who, for example, suffocates the Cypriot or stabs the Colonel, loose ends that are never fully resolved. In the end, all of the “really bad” guys are dealt with, but one of the mates from the garage is dead as well as the undercover agent in the Caribbean. All of this would work more effectively if – and really only if – we had more of a sense of the gang as individuals, but Clement & La Frenais’ script here – and the film’s pacing is often right out of their work on the ersatz Beatles’ movie as well – is too hurried to spend time on non-plot-driven moments like character. In an odd way, even as they’re blowing up their genre, it’s taking the ultimate revenge on their movie.

The awkwardness & loose ends are, of course, justified by the claim that all of this is “real,” a claim predicated on the assertion that the writers got the story from one or more of the parties involved. Some of the details here – Michael X’s behavior, for example, including the murder of Gale Anne Benson – are matters of public record. Others, including Princess Margaret’s sexual behavior, are matters so widely rumored (e.g. her relationships with Peter Sellers or Mick Jagger, with members of her own sex, or with a gardener 17 years younger than herself) that they might as well be public record. But this is documentation much in the same way as we get in a film like Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, in which we learn that TV game show entrepreneur Chuck Barris (The Dating Game, The Newlywed Game, The Gong Show, Treasure Hunt) spent his off hours as a CIA hit man. You can prove that Chuck Barris exists, that he had these shows, even that he wrote the Freddy Cannon hit “Palisades Park.” But that doesn’t mean you can prove anything about a career in intelligence, let alone 33 assassinations.

Not unlike the robbery in The Bank Job, the film itself almost works. The raggedness at the end of the film is far more “real” than the neat summing up one might expect from an Oceans caper flick, but the trip to & through this moment just isn’t done quite as effectively as it needs to be. If, after all, this is all “true,” why does Terry’s relationship with Martine feel like such a studio stereotype? Keeley Hawes as Terry’s wife has a great, if small, part – her reaction to the whole plot, right up to the final scene, is one driven by a sense of what risk Terry has put her family in. If only every role had been governed with that same sense of necessity.

 

¹ From a career that includes The Pawnbroker, Network, Serpico, Fail-Safe, Long Day’s Journey into Night, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead & many of the great early television dramas.

[Warning: There is a “spoiler” below, tho only if you don’t know Gregory Corso’s history or have never read his entry on Wikipedia.]

My very first thought, the instant I began watching Corso: The Last Beat, which opens literally on Mount Parnassus, was to wonder what Michael McClure, Gary Snyder or Lawrence Ferlinghetti must think of that subtitle. Ninety minutes later, sad to see this sweet movie end, its subject, Gregory Corso, now buried literally at the feet of his beloved Percy Bysshe Shelley in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome, I realized that just like Kerouac’s tossed-off phrase that got taken over & caricatured by the media, the term Beat in the title here means many different things, only one of which – and perhaps the least important – would be beatnik or even beat poet.

Gustave Reininger’s documentary is many things – a partial history of the Beat Generation, an account of a particular school of poetics, a travelogue of important sites for poetry that ranges from the Acropolis to the Beat Hotel, San Remo Bar & Clinton State Prison, a partial history of the last four years of Gregory Corso’s life, even a mystery story with a remarkable ending – but most importantly it’s the tale of the end of life & watching a man summing up his victories & losses over the course of 70 years. So what I hear in that title now is the suffix that comes after Heart-.

The story is in fact framed by two deaths – that of Allen Ginsberg, right near the film’s start, which has some amazing footage of the entourage surrounding Ginsberg’s bed in his Lower East Side apartment as Allen lay dying from the after effects of a stroke in April 1997, monks proceeding through a death ritual, Patti Smith pacing, Corso literally draping himself over Ginsberg’s body as if to protect him, and that of Corso’s own death at the film’s end, told in a far more circumspect manner, even as we see him carted in a gurney to the hospital & watch family & friends all come to say farewell.

The “core circle of the Beats” in the telling here consists of just four people: Ginsberg, Corso, William Burroughs – who dies just four months after Ginsberg – and Jack Kerouac. Brion Gysin is mentioned, but only in passing. None of the western poets turn up at all. Instead, the gut of this film consists of following Corso as he returns to Europe to see the places that inspired him as a youth: Greece, his ancestral Italy & Paris. In Europe, Corso is not the wasted space cadet living modestly on royalties from a few books that sold in the millions in the 1950s, but a cultural hero to a generation of bright-eyed fawning youngsters amazed to see at last one of the figures who actually lived the romance they envision from the books of the Beats. Where Burroughs (Harvard), Ginsberg (Columbia), Kerouac (Columbia) all came from good educations with all that entails, little Nunzio Corso – Gregory is his confirmation name – got his in the Tombs & especially Clinton State Prison for various acts of petty theft (Corso’s greatest crime appears to have been the theft of a second-hand suit). Clinton was distinguished by the fact that it had, by prison standards, a good library, thanks to previous tenant Lucky Luciano, the original Godfather. The youngest inmate, Nunzio was encouraged in his self-education by the made guys who literally watched the youngster’s back.

The teenager who emerged from prison was a poet well before he first met Allen Ginsberg in a lesbian bar in the Village. Indeed, Corso somehow managed to get Archibald Macleish & others at Harvard to let him audit classes & even had his first book – The Vestal Lady in Brattle – published there before Howl & On the Road changed his publishing life forever (Lady was later incorporated into Gasoline, one of the best-selling books of poetry ever). In the film, Corso is presented reading from the same few canonical poems again & again (including “Sea Chanty,” written at Clinton State) – there is a great reading of “Bomb.” He comes across very much aware of himself not as a new formalist maudit, but as a satirist.

There are any number of genuinely magic moments in this movie, perhaps the first of which is Corso’s visit to Clinton State Prison where he talks to a group of young inmates, every one of them black. You can see their suspicion in their body language as Corso begins talking, trying to figure out why this character, who looks just one step removed from being a street alcoholic pushing 70, should be talking to them. But you can see their body language change as it becomes clear that Corso’s own experiences there parallels their own, and what begins as a painfully awkward moment turns into a real dialog. As he walks away from the institution, Corso has nothing negative to say about prison – it was literally his education, tho I don’t think that was exactly what the state of New York had in mind.

Even more profound is the story of Corso’s childhood. His mother abandoned him on the steps of Catholic Charities and disappeared when he was only an infant. His first poem, the aforementioned “Sea Chanty,” focuses on this primal experience. Corso imagines that she’s returned to her native Italy and is long since dead. His father, clearly a brutal man, farmed the child off to foster care and soon Corso was in & out of trouble with the law. When his father was in prison, Corso spent his days living on the streets & his nights sleeping on rooftops in Manhattan, all at the age of 13. Reininger is circumspect – too much so in fact – about Corso’s own marriages or his own role (or lack thereof) as a father & you don’t even get a sense from the movie that Corso died in Minnesota where he was being taken care of by a daughter.

Instead, we see Corso the son with functionally no parents. When in Italy, Reininger & Corso attempt to track his mother down, to find her grave. But there is no record of her, even tho in Italy all records go back to your birthplace, which should make people easier to find. At different points in the film, this becomes a foregrounded part of the narrative. Eventually, though, Reininger’s various attempts pay off. The trail leads not to some remote Italian village, but to Trenton, New Jersey, and to a small house in which his mother has been living for decades. The film actually captures the son, nearly 70, meeting his mother really for the first time. She is as amazed as he is, and other than insisting that he needs a haircut seems not phased in the slightest to have a Beat poet for a child.

Paul Thomas Anderson makes intelligent, well focused films: Boogie Nights, Magnolia, Punch Drunk Love & now There Will Be Blood. Because of the first two, Anderson is acknowledged as a master of the ensemble film & it’s true that he says his favorite movie of all time is Network & that There Will Be Blood is dedicated to the late Robert Altman, the Picasso of the genre. But There Will Be Blood is much more like Punch Drunk Love in that it’s a character study, a film fixed firmly on a single individual whose narrative unveils their personality. I recall Kathy Acker once telling me that character was, for her, the most mysterious element in fiction, that it was one thing to have sentences & paragraphs integrate upward into a story line, but something altogether different to give a sense of a living, breathing person, especially somebody who might be altogether different from the author.

Daniel Plainview, the misanthropic oil speculator portrayed by Daniel Day-Lewis, presumably is quite a bit different from Anderson. Who Plainview is not particularly different from is Fred C. Dobbs, the paranoid prospector at the center of Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Anderson admits that when he wrote the screenplay, adapted from Upton Sinclair’s Oil!, he would watch Treasure each night as he fell asleep. If Lewis plays Plainview as though he were living the role thoroughly, it may well be that he both understands this model uncommonly well – and he knows that his real competition here is Humphrey Bogart at his most extravagant. Dobbs’ paranoia is a little more wild-eyed than Plainview’s, but under the surface the same DNA beats in both. You can still see the remnants of Upton Sinclair’s moral tale about the evil that capital wreaks on the men most determined to have it. Plainview’s a man determined to win and the simplest way to do that is to deny the humanity of one’s competitors. That in turn might justify just about anything. Who a competitor is proves highly situational: it might be the man who owns the land you seek to lease or buy; it might be Standard Oil; it could be the baby-faced evangelical who wants to minister to your employees; it could even be your son. Or your brother. But once you are competition, however Plainview defines it, you are outside the infinitely small circle of what he might care about. In a sense, this film, like Martin Scorsese’s not too dissimilar The Aviator, chronicles just how that circle tightens the more successful Plainview is.

Success does isolate an individual. Just ask Britney Spears. But, Anderson suggests, more than suggests, some people succeed because they are driven to isolate themselves. Plainview says as much at different moments in the movie. I’m not convinced of the psychology of this, but it does make for an effective story arc. Anderson accentuates it by surrounding Day-Lewis with character actors who haven’t been overused – David Willis, who plays the preacher’s dad Abel Sunday, is an actor roughly my age who has been in exactly four motion pictures, one of them 26 years ago. You might remember him as Franz Bettmann in The Good German, but the roles are so different it’s improbable. Indeed, the one person you might recognize in this production besides Day-Lewis is likely to be Paul Dano, who plays the baby-faced preacher as well as his opportunist brother. Dano was the silent teenager in Little Miss Sunshine who wanted to be an astronaut. Again the roles are so different that neither my wife nor son recognized him. Russell Harvard, who plays the grown-up son H.W. Plainview, has just short film credit to his name, plus a single episode of CSI: New York. Kevin O’Connor, who plays Daniel’s brother, has bounced around as a character actor for years, but his biggest role to date has been as Igor, Dr. Frankenstein’s assistant in Van Helsing.

Surrounding Day-Lewis with actors you can’t name is a great way to make the file entirely about his character. It’s one of many subtle devices like this throughout the film, which does not go out of its way to explain things. For example, one question that neither I nor my wife or my son could answer is what was in the diary that young H.W. read & did it cause him to set the fire to the cabin? Was H.W. trying to “get” the brother? It’s actually possible that the answer is there on the screen, but unlike most Hollywood movies, Anderson doesn’t bludgeon you with details. I wonder how many viewers even notice the narrative of how Plainview acquires the boy, which occurs in the first 90 seconds of the motion picture (he’s not lying when he later denies that the son has any of his blood). And I myself missed the moment of transition from Texas to California until I suddenly started to recognize landscapes and hear names like San Luis Obispo, Tehachapi & Modesto. I’ll wager that there are more than a few viewers who think the whole film occurs in the Lone Star State.

Day-Lewis isn’t always my cup of tea as an actor. I wasn’t particularly impressed with him in Gangs of New York, tho he received an Oscar nomination for the role. And it was impossible to see him in My Left Foot (for which he won the Oscar for best actor) without thinking that I knew a much better writer with many of these same issues in Larry Eigner. Left Foot thus came across as melodramatic, sentimental & wildly overacted. What would it have looked like if I hadn’t known somebody whose physical vocabulary was every bit as restricted as Larry’s? I really have no clue. But in fact I generally have preferred Day-Lewis’ earlier performances, especially in My Beautiful Laundrette & The Unbearable Lightness of Being, both of which came out at least 20 years ago.

This film, however, was made for Day-Lewis. In many ways, it’s about what he can do as an actor. He’s on-screen 98 percent of the time & often is asked to do nothing more than glower or convey an intense-but-withheld emotion via his lower lip. Most of his dialog is a lie, and we have to see this in a way so that we understand it and the characters on screen would not. Plainview’s walk prior to the broken leg is as distinct & unmodern (or at least unsophisticated) as his limp is later. His eyebrows are always “in character.” There are a couple of moments, particularly when he’s expressing anger, where I don’t quite believe him, but they add up to less than a minute’s worth of this film’s total of 158.

It’s become fashionable in recent years, especially in westerns – and the Texas oilfields around Marfa a century ago certainly qualify – to have the protagonist come across as scruffy, which helps strip the veneer of glamour from Day-Lewis’ presentation. Russell Crowe in 3:10 to Yuma looks like an escapee from the Village People by comparison. But the origin of this approach, of course, is precisely Bogart’s Dobbs in Sierra Madre. In the inevitable comparison between the two actors, Bogart wins hands down. Not only is Bogart’s role permanently memorable – once you’ve seen the wild glint of Fred C. Dobbs, you’ll never forget it – but Bogart has to share the screen with some major performers in Walter Huston – he had once been D.W. Griffith’s Abraham Lincoln – and Tim Holt, not to mention classic character actors in Barton Maclane and Alfonso Bedoya.¹ Anderson really gives Day-Lewis only Paul Dano & Kevin O’Connor to work with. Although Dano’s baby-faced evangelist appears not to age a day between 1902 and 1927, the young actor does a decent job standing up to Day-Lewis under difficult circumstances (tho he does far better when confronting his own father, played by Willis). It’s not a fair situation for Dano or for Day-Lewis.

I’m not convinced that I’d vote for Day-Lewis for best actor were it up to me – I think Emile Hirsch actually handles a more difficult role with far greater subtlety in Into the Wild, but Hirsch didn’t even get nominated. On the other hand, if you want to spend an evening watching one of the best give us a damn fine version of Bogie, then There Will Be Blood is your film.

 

¹ Sierra Madre made Bedoya’s career in the US, although he’d already made over 50 films in Mexico.

Pierre Bayard is of course correct – there are many different ways to consume books. This is true for films also. Seeing a film for the second time is always a different experience than the first. But there are also different ways to see a film for a second time. The most common is to have seen it originally in a theater, then later to catch on DVD or perhaps on television (worse yet, on an airplane). I can’t even tell you how many times I’ve seen different parts of The Godfather. I joke with the kids that sometime on any given day The Godfather is playing somewhere on cable, in some configuration. I can turn it on, see five minutes anywhere – maybe just Robert DeNiro stealing the rug or Al Pacino walking through the Sicilian fields with his new (and doomed) infatuation, or Sofia Coppola, shot in the chest at the end of the still deeply underappreciated III, looking at Pacino, saying “Daddy” before she slumps to the steps – and feel completely satisfied, as if I’ve watched the entire trilogy once again. Indeed, one of the secret pleasures of cinema is clicking the remote through the cable spectrum seeing five minutes of this, one or two of that, just identifying each film before clicking on. Who hasn’t played that game?

Seeing a film twice in the theater is an experience I used to have fairly often as a young adult – there are films like Weekend, Blow-up, The Saragossa Manuscript, that I saw over & over when I was around 20, even Casablanca, Treasure of the Sierra Madre and Forbidden Planet. With both Casablanca and Forbidden Planet, anyone whom I was newly dating but who had not yet seen those films was fair game for taking to see it the instant it showed up at one of the art houses in San Francisco or Berkeley. I knew they would be grateful to be turned on to these treasures & a film like Casablanca led one almost directly to the bedroom. Monsieur Rick has been very very good to me.

In recent years, I’ve seen films in the theater twice only on rare occasions. The Matrix is one film – it totally blew me away when I first saw it on a business trip to San Francisco & I had to be sure that it really was as powerful as I thought. Unfortunately, it wasn’t. I did almost the exact same thing for Saving Private Ryan and it was as powerful the second time – Spielberg is a much better filmmaker than most critics are willing to acknowledge.

A third example, but a different kind of experience, was the first Lord of the Rings movie. Krishna had not wanted the boys to see it – they were just nine years old & Krishna is pretty militant about avoiding violent films. But they’d read the books & were dying to see it. Krishna went out of town for a few days so there was nobody around to tell us not to go. And it is a great way to spend an afternoon with nine-year-old boys, in a theater filled with other parents doing the same thing. The following week was Christmas and the family visited Krishna’s sisters down in Virginia & they’d all seen Lord of the Rings (one sister is a certified Tolkien fanatic) & were raving about how wonderful the movie was. Any controversy had to do with the absence of Tom Bombadil, not the level of combat or gore. This was good, because it got me out of the doghouse I’d constructed for myself taking the boys when I “should have known” that their mother would have disapproved. By the end of the evening, Krishna made me promise that we – the boys included – would take her to see it, which we soon did.

That was a film where the spectacle & being able to share it was a central part of the pleasure of the reiteration. It’s a well-crafted trilogy overall and I can watch two minutes of it on the telly these days in somewhat the same way as I do The Godfather. The difference here is that I often don’t remember all the scenes, and I have a much harder time telling the three films apart. It’s successful cinema, but I don’t think of it as one of the lasting masterpieces of the genre, where The Godfather is almost the perfect instance of Hollywood narrative.

One week after seeing I’m Not There, the so-called Dylan anti-biopic by Todd Haynes, with a bunch of friends, I took one of my sons to see it out in Phoenixville, an old mill town on the far side of Valley Forge that has survived the loss of its mill. Because the film was playing at 7:00, it had a decent turn out, much better than the later showing we had seen in closer-to-the-city collegiate Bryn Mawr. But it’s worth noting that my kid was the only person in the crowd under 40.

One of the obvious differences on re-seeing a film is that foreshadowing is now all marked out. The title of I’m Not There comes on as Cate Blanchett – she’s so distant you don’t realize in the first viewing that it’s her – revs up the motorcycle & drives off stage right. That very same scene is a critical moment roughly two hours & ten minutes later. Similarly, when we first see Woody Guthrie (Marcus Carl Franklin, pictured above) hop onto the freight, he does so from the same field where, near the film’s end, Billy the Kid sees his wayward dog, Henry, chase after the train he too has hopped. That’s just an understated part of the same big red bow I referred to being tied together in that second scene.

Some scenes that had been difficult to follow the first time through – such as Claire’s pausing to watch the filming of Robbie Clark portraying Jack Rollins – now seem completely coherent because I know what it means & where it’s going. You can follow the dialog more closely – I realized, for example, that I misquoted the sexist comment in my review the other day. Robbie (Heath Ledger) says “I worship women. Everyone should have one.” I actually think my original mishearing was stronger and to the same point. It’s just not what actually gets said on screen.

Timing changes almost entirely. When you can’t see what’s coming next, timing is experienced as very open-ended. You feel the timing but you don’t necessarily sense it, if I can make that distinction. The second time through, pleasure in the timing comes as a result of everything hitting its position perfectly, which is to say “as you remembered it.” Yet one result is that I’m Not There feels like a much shorter picture the second time – the few scenes I had complained about dragging on first viewing turn out not to be nearly as long as I had thought. I still would have edited the run-up to the second confrontation with Mr Jones a little, but quite a bit less than I would have expected after my first viewing.

And there are the elements you simply didn’t get at all before, here most notably realizing that Canadian character actor Bruce Greenwood plays both Mr Jones and Pat Garrett. There is even an instantaneous flash of Mr Jones interspersed into the scene where Billy the Kid (Richard Gere) confronts Garrett, only to be arrested, but was I alert enough to catch the implication of that? Not the first time, I wasn’t. Similarly, I didn’t even notice Lyndon Baines Johnson quoting “Tombstone Blues” – “The sky is not yellow, it’s chicken.” I’ll wager that Haynes used the exact footage where LBJ infamously quoted another song of that era, “We Shall Overcome.”

Some of the jokes work better the second time because you click into the timing of them in anticipation of the punch line. An interviewer asks the Mighty Quinn if he/she wants to change the world and Cate Blanchett replies, leaning forward one hand cupping her ear, “Change the word?” Actually, the second time through really cements my respect – astonishment almost – at the quality of the writing in this film. A lot of it may be verbatim from existing Dylan materials, but the degree of making it fit together, including here the lyrics of whatever’s on the soundtrack at that moment, is much more tightly stitched than we get in Dylan’s own Chronicles: Volume One, let alone Tarantula.

Because of comments to my review on the blog by Andy Gricevitch – also by Luther Blissett and Levari (Lee Sternthal) – I really looked closely at the relation between the Billy the Kid / Riddle Missouri narrative and The Basement Tapes, Dylan’s period of recovery in Woodstock, NY, from the motorcycle accident & the drug detoxification it occasioned. It made me realize that, while I didn’t have the dissatisfaction with that scene many of the professional reviewers professed, part of its difficulty is that Haynes is really trying to make the material do multiple things simultaneously, and that it doesn’t quite come off.

The first is the long fallow period Dylan had from the mid-1980s up until roughly 1995, which is what I saw in having the aged Gere look even more grizzled as he wanders around Riddle hearing tales of how Pat Garrett is planning to put down a six-lane highway, forcing everyone to evacuate – there are several images of what look like deep West Virginia-style hillbillies turned into refugees. But it’s true also that Haynes borrows heavily here from the imagery on and about The Basement Tapes, both the songs and the original album cover art. Yet he’s gone to this palette before in young Woody Guthrie’s brief period with the circus – Gorgeous George, the Nebraska-born wrestler whose flamboyant style would be the template followed & elaborated on by everyone from Liberacé to Little Richard to Elvis to Elton John, and who makes an appearance in Chronicles: Volume One, is a key figure here. Plus the Riddle funeral sequence – one of the most powerful and surreal moments in the entire film – uses My Morning Jacket’s lead singer Jim James wearing the same mime’s whiteface that Dylan adopted for the Rolling Thunder tour as he sings “Going to Acapulco,” which Gricevitch is right to note is the best rendition that song’s ever received.

Haynes I think wants the Riddle material – the town is, as young Guthrie tells the hoboes on the train, a “composé” of many different places – to serve multiple narrative lines simultaneously. This of course is one possible advantage of telling a story that everyone already knows. It’s only after we’ve begun this narrative thread, for example, do we get the story of Jack Rollins’ conversion to Christianity and resurrection as Father John (told in part by one sad sack member of the congregation named T-Bone¹). So I think one might see this as being at least three parallel narrative lines simultaneously – convalescence, conversion & his artistic resurrection in the mid-nineties. If Haynes ultimately gets tangled up in the threads here, it’s not for underestimating his audience. Perhaps the most pernicious aspect of Hollywood’s submission to the principles of marketing as a narrative practice is the tendency in American movies to have each shot or scene equal one – and only one – idea. That is not the problem in I’m Not There. It’s as rich – richer even – on a second viewing as it was on the first. I’m Not There really is one of the finest American films ever made.

 

¹ One version of Dylan’s conversion to evangelical Christianity credits T-Bone Burnett for bringing him to the Lord during the Rolling Thunder Tour. I’m Not There seems generally to follow the alternate version that Dylan was brought there by one of his spouses.

You start to realize that Todd Haynes has nailed it, produced something close to a miracle, a reasonably big budget motion picture with A-list players that is as intelligent as its audience, even before you’re through the opening titles to I’m Not There. Very close to the last thing I did in 2007 was finally get together with a number of friends, have a big old Cajun meal at Carmines & head over to the Bryn Mawr Film Institute where the so-called Dylan biopic is finally playing, albeit only at 1:30 in the afternoon & 9:45 at night. Tho the Bryn Mawr, in spite of its collegiate name, tends to skew to boomers, we saw it in a large theater with a sparse crowd – had everyone else see this film downtown? Or is it that the absence of a 7:00 o’clock show (which it got only for the opening weekend at the BMFI) is the kiss of death for a crowd that now likes to be tucked in bed before Jay Leno comes out to play. Still, this was a great, thrilling movie experience, one of the best American motion pictures I’ve ever seen. Period.

It’s not any single shot that convinces you of this at first – tho some of them are stunners, especially the pans of lines at what appear to be homeless shelters or food missions – is that Moondog waiting in line? – as it is the constant shuffle between shots, now in black & white, now in color, this image grainy, that one clear as contemporary cinema can manufacture. Everything you’ve ever heard about six different actors portraying Dylan, not one of them actually named either Dylan or Zimmerman, pales against the realization that this film is not six sequential vignettes, but rather going to be a continual shuffle of all six, from beginning to end, that its fundamental commitment is to keep you off balance from train ride to train ride. That is a brilliant challenge to take on, probably the most difficult thing any director can attempt. The film that follows is not perfect, but it is damn near close enough to keep all its major promises.

I had found myself finally approaching this film with some trepidation – how many times have I heard great things about a film only to be let down by the actual experience itself, which turned out not to be nearly as terrific as the film I’d imagined beforehand? I was almost certain that having heard so many of my friends – and especially my poet friends – rave on about I’m Not There, that I was in for another round of that experience. To my surprise, it was quite the opposite. I’d long ago stopped believing that American cinema could make a film like this – this was a level of complexity only possible in the longpoem – so when I actually began to realize just what Haynes was doing, I had a hard time sitting still in my seat. The last time I was this excited in a theater was probably the opening night for Antonioni’s Blow-Up or Godard’s Weekend, both of which came out 40 years ago. Those films at the time struck me – as does I’m Not There – as miracles, moments when the collaborative process that is a movie has come together to produce something extraordinary.

The secret to I’m Not There is simple – everyone knows the story, even down to the bullshit fictions of a childhood that Dylan put out early in his career, so there is no need here to tell it again (indeed, the weakest moments in the film are the few instances where Haynes does feel the need to recreate an historic moment, as such, whether it’s debacle of the civil rights award speech, Dylan the born-again preacher, the reaction to Maggie’s Farm at Newport, which Haynes at least has the sense to satirize – right down to Pete Seeger with the ax – or the fact that Dylan was always credited by the Beatles as being the first one to turn them onto drugs). Instead, I’m Not There most often references, alludes, plays with the details. Thus a twelve-year-old African American who calls himself Woody Guthrie finds himself riding boxcars with hoboes & tells them he’s been writing songs for Carl Perkins & playing backup for Bobby Vee (which in fact Dylan briefly did, Vee’s band being the one post-doo-wop Tin Pan Alley act to come out of the same Midwest North Country as little Bobby Z). It’s a point, like having Guthrie’s motto – This Machine Kills Fascists – scrawled on his guitar case, that makes sense only to a knowing audience (or, much later, Cate Blanchett as the Mighty Jude Quinn, alluding in passing to Brian Jones “and his groovy cover band”).

If you don’t know Bob Dylan, if you don’t know the details of the lore surrounding him, I’m Not There is apt to seem entirely opaque – why is a tarantula crawling across the screen? Why does Blanchett ride a motorbike off screen followed by the sound of a crash & a single (now suddenly in color) image of bike & body covered in the woods? Why do Quinn & Arthur Rimbaud & Jack Rollins seem so completely uncomfortable in their own skins when questioned & prodded by the media? What’s going on here with this paunchy, scraggly, middle-aged Billy the Kid, portrayed by, of all people, former “Sexiest Man in the World” (and one-time Paoli resident) Richard Gere? Most of the reviews – even extremely positive ones like that of Roger Ebert – have seemed at a loss with this sequence in Riddle, Missouri, a town that doesn’t show up on the maps of either Google or Juan de la Cosa. Readers of Chronicles: Volume One, however, will recognize it as what I think of as the San Rafael sequence from Dylan’s autobiography, where Dylan, burned out & bored, reduced to being an opening act for the Grateful Dead, has an epiphaney in the Marin County town about a new way of thinking through & enunciating his repertoire that will lead him not just to the rebirth of his music, with the albums Time Out of Mind (Platinum), Love & Theft (Gold), and Modern Times (Platinum), the latter making the one-time boy genius of folk the oldest performer ever to have an album debut at the top of the charts, but also return him as one of the hottest performing tickets in the music industry, even as Carpal Tunnel Syndrome has forced him off guitar apparently for good. Richard Gere getting back on the train – from which little boy Woody Guthrie was hurled into the river years before – is the most allegorical moment I’ve seen in ages in a major film. Finding his old guitar under the empty sacks & floorboards of the boxcar, complete with the ol’ motto covered by dust, all but ties a giant red ribbon on it. Gere’s own aimlessness up to that moment isn’t a problem of the film – it’s the theme, as such, followed by a closing sequence of Dylan himself doing an impossibly long sequence on harmonica.¹

Besides the story that everybody already knows, the other elements that hold this fabulous collage together are (1) Haynes’ sense of rhythm, which he only loses once or twice as scenes carry on too long (cf. the aforementioned Beatles’ appearance in the midst of the too-long run-up to the revelation of a BBC producer – made to look & sound exactly like George Plimpton – as Mr. Jones).; and (2) Cate Blanchett’s ballsy spot-on performance. Because the six Dylan surrogates and their tales are shuffled throughout, Blanchett’s on screen continually from beginning to end. If there ever was any question that she’s the best actor of our generation, this should put it to rest. There isn’t any role for which she wouldn’t be the right performer – she could do Barack Obama, Tony Soprano or Jabba the Hut if she had to, and she’d make a great Tinkerbell. Here you will be shocked to recognize afterwards just how many times her performance made you realize (a) oh yeah, Dylan’s a woman, (b) this really isn’t a guy in this role and, conversely, just how much of the time you were completely oblivious to the question of gender altogether. It’s never really the point Haynes is making, tho he clearly wants us to consider the degree to which Dylan benefits from being in touch with his feminine side (which is why the material confronting Dylan’s unreconstructed sexism – “I love women. Really I do. I think everyone should have one.” – is so important).

Haynes’ strategy makes great sense in trying to tell the story of someone for whom the contradictions are what matter most. I’ve noted before that my favorite part of any motion picture is almost always that period at the beginning where the viewer is being pummeled by details that have not yet gelled into a coherent & increasingly narrow narrative that resolves finally into a chase scene. Haynes has made a motion picture that strives to be entirely composed of opening moments. It’s amazing just how much of this he’s able to do. As the credits began rolling, I said out loud “I could see that again tomorrow.” When the time comes, I’m Not There clearly is a film to buy, rather than just rent.

 

¹ One of the small surprises of the film is just how much of the singing is Dylan himself, not the recordings of the “sound track” double CD, even tho that turns out to be the best collection of Dylan covers ever assembled.