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At first glance, I'm Not There, Todd Haynes's gorgeous meditation on the mythic lives of Bob Dylan, might seem to be a cinematic seminar for Dylanologists. It's not. The various personae in the film who, taken together, can be said to make up Dylan, are ingenious and never tedious. Cate Blanchett's mid-sixties incarnation is suitably crackling and sublime; the early seventies portrayal by Heath Ledger is all solemnity among shag carpets and mushroom-and-avocado decor; Christian Bale is captivatingly tortured; and the young Marcus Carl Franklin, who enacts the artist's Woody Guthrie rail-riding creation myth, is a revelation.
Haynes, given free rein by Dylan, bends truths, reinvents principles, and undermines both the central tenets and trivial factoids that enthusiasts hold dear. Those who've managed to live outside the mythology should be entertained by the most cinematic life story in contemporary history as well as surprised at the reinvention of film's most tiring genre—the biopic—by America's master renderer of mood and period detail.
Much like Dylan's, Woody Allen's multiphasic career has become its own sort of cultural currency. His latest film, Cassandra's Dream, seems to be three chapters in search of a fourth in his Scotland Yard period. Allen has replaced Café des Artistes with Claridge's and nebbishy midlife adulterers with ruthless young strivers.
Colin Farrell and Ewan McGregor play brothers engaged in a tour de force meditation on conscience. McGregor's steely-eyed performance rises above the often-stilted script, and Farrell seems born to play the worried lug. Unlike in his last two London sojourns, Allen does not serve up two scoops of Scarlett Johansson, but he's made a lovely discovery in Hayley Atwell as McGregor's ambitious girlfriend.
Neither Dylan nor Allen has much of anything to prove anymore, yet they keep working. God bless America. An excess of Bob Dylan and a truncated Woody Allen drama remind audiences that both artful codgers remain works in progress.
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