I'm Not There

In one of the key scenes of "I'm Not There," one of the five quasi-Bob Dylans (the primary one, Cate Blanchett) ducks the queries of a British reporter (Bruce Greenwood) with layers upon layers of bullshit. Unfortunately, that's the closest you get to him--by being so adamant about not being pigeon-holed, he becomes a flat character and, though Dylan is not exonerated for behaving so arrogantly, the reporter is penalized for asking straightforward questions. Even if this jives with the real Dylan's behavior (as I'm told is shown in the 1966 D.A. Pennebaker documentary, "Don't Look Back"), it's incredibly unsatisfying, especially in a fiction film. It's a shame, too, because there's a lot commendable in this movie. The director, Todd Haynes, successfully combines three strands of the folk singer--and two abstracts: Heath Ledger as an actor who played a singer like Dylan and Richard Gere as Billy the Kid--without leaving the audience confused.

The Blanchett part, the heart of the movie, is particularly good. She's great in an off-hand, here-for-the-ride type way and David Cross makes a brilliantly absurd Ginsberg; even the goofiness--stylistic cues and references to "A Hard Day's Night," "Masculin Féminin" and "8 1/2"--works as a kind of wacky pastiche of Swinging London. Some of it, however, is terribly blah: Heath Ledger's divorce melodrama does not only seem to not pertain to Dylan, it seems like it belongs to a lamer movie. (One scene, where he turns chauvinist-pig and hippie sell-out, however, is right on.) But the movie throws in heavy-handed symbols (like Billy the Kid seeing footage of L.B.J. and Nam flash across the Old West landscape) which wouldn't work even if they weren't counter to the movie's resistance to paint a fuller picture of Dylan. It's a smart, proficient and stylish movie, but it wants to answer questions and then refuses to. To be fair, I can't count myself as anything more than a casual fan of the musician, but even if "I'm Not There" (a fitting title) reflects his real attitudes, it seems like a cheat. Dylan obviously means to say something in his music; if he denies that, he's got more problems than this movie suggests.

The Birds

Because I used to dismiss "The Birds" as simply Hitchcock at his hokiest, I was surprised how much I liked the film when I rewatched it recently. The love story is both lame and ridiculous; Rod Taylor is a lawyer and Melanie (Tippi Hendren) is a spoiled heiress and a prankster--but really they're both squares. Of course, Taylor's mother, Lydia (Jessica Tandy), is a salty old widow who distrusts his suitors and fears abandonment. And we're given an erstwhile lover of Taylor's who has relocated herself to Bodega Bay--the Northern California town that becomes the birds' prey--even though she and the attorney are now "just friends." Worst of all, Taylor's eleven-year-old sister (who begs the question, how old is Taylor supposed to be?) is terribly precocious and disturbingly fond of Melanie. This soggy subplot is either hackneyed soap opera or a stroke of genius: the random onslaught of the aviary exposes how trite these unbelievable stock characters are. One character mentions Oedipus in reference to Taylor's relationship with his mother; later on, Lydia finds a victim of a bird attack whose eyes have been pecked out.

Usually Hitchcock's famous "maguffin" was negligible (i.e. nuclear plans in "Notorious," stolen information in "North by Northwest") and the romance was at the heart of the flick; here, it's the other way around. However, given the amount of screen time devoted to the boy-meets-girl story and the fact that a few scenes--particularly a monologue given by Tandy in bed--are particularly well-acted, it's hard to believe that a big part of Hitchcock did not buy into the old movie treacle. Regardless, there's some brilliant Soviet-style editing and Hitchcock's decision to not have any music on the soundtrack--in lieu of electronic bird noises--is quite effectively chilly, despite the fact that he sacrificed what could have been another great Bernard Herrmann score in order to attain it. Plus, aside from the silly, irrational plot (both the birds and the melodrama) there are some explicitly funny scenes, such as an exchange between a miserly old ornithologist and a casual harbinger of the apocalypse at a café. (This may lead some to read a green, anti-industrialization message into the movie, but I think it's wiser to see it as Biblical hokum meant to ratchet up the confusion and terror.) In many ways, this movie is a precursor to "Jaws," which was still twelve years away.

Monsieur Verdoux

Charlie Chaplin plays anything but a tramp in "Monsieur Verdoux." The story (the idea for which is credited to Orson Welles) involves a French bank clerk who, after being laid off at the onset of the Great Depression, murders an array of old dames that he courts in order for his beloved family to live in modest comfort. While we may not spend much time with his wife and son, the implication that they are a happy, normal family--an enlightened one, perhaps, as they are vegetarians (couldn't have been too common in nineteen-thirties France)--is clear.

Verdoux can kill because he's an incredible cynic, or, rather, he's become one after having watched the world dissolve around him; his pragmatism, after all, is forged out of a traditionalist's notion of love. One almost wants to see a bit more tenderness--when his family dies off-screen, Chaplin misses an extraordinary opportunity to exhibit what must have been a crucial moment for his character--but one also appreciates the black comedy and the snippets of slapstick that Chaplin was still able to pull off (he was 58 at the time).

There's a wild farcicality in the tone; but the wry deadpan of our proto-Hannibal Lecter hero never undercuts the notion that murder is bad. The ambiguity is rich and textured and doesn't really go overboard because of its slick Old Hollywood shell. The movie is flawed--Chaplin gets a little too preachy at the end and his rendering of France is not particularly believable--but "Monsieur Verdoux" hasn't lost its edge.