Current Date:March 28, 2024
I am not there

Movie 4 D Week: I’m Not There

Movie 4 D Week: I’m Not There

Director: Tod Haynes

Inspired by the many lives of Bob Dylan says the movie and that is quite the only time ‘Bob Dylan’ the name figures in the entire movie. Marcus Carl Franklin (Woody Guthrie), Ben Winshaw (Arthur Rimbaud), Heath Ledger (Robbie Clark), Christian Bale (Jack Rollins / Pastor John), Richard Gere (Billy the Kid) and Cate Blanchett (Jude Quinn) are the different lives. Cate Blanchett is very good and you just cannot miss the mannerisms she has worked on if you have seen ‘No direction home’ and know what I mean. Each character plays a different stage of Dylan’s life and “When I wake I’m one person, when I go to sleep I know for certain I’m somebody else. I don’t know who I am most of the time. It’s like you got yesterday, today and tomorrow all in the same room. There’s no telling what’s going to happen” more or less sums it up. Arthur Rimbaud, the poet, is the narrator of the various stages and seems to string it all together besides of course the guitar ‘This machine kills fascists’ and at least one photograph that gives the different characters a sort of continuity. You will make multiple connections if you are a Dylan fan. Besides you will see Joan Baez, Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Allen Ginsberg and many others walk in and out. This is a brilliant biography of Bob Dylan and in his own words “All I can do is be me, whoever that is”. Kris Kristofferson, who also happens to be a close friend of Bob Dylan, is the narrator.

The Director Todd Haynes supposedly never met Bob Dylan. The various sections in the film are inspired by Fellini’s 8 ½, Goddard’s Masculine Feminine and some of Sam Peckinpah (‘Straw Dogs’, ‘The Wild bunch’ and ‘Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid’) Westerns.

Useless trivia : The movie title ‘I’m not there’ is from Dylan’s unreleased song. A seventh character which was a Charlie Chaplin-like Dylan was part of the script but dropped during filming. The film appeared in various top ten films of the year 2007 lists including ‘The Village Voice’. And if any of you want to see a hard copy of ‘The Village Voice’ I have couple of copies brought to me by a good old friend. You won’t regret subscribing to the cult-mag site www.villagevoice.com

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