Last week, after mixing up what day it was (it gets like that, sometimes), I found myself standing at the local Dendy box office, realising the film I intended to see (The Darjeeling Limited) wasn't going to happen. Damned, if I was going to waste the trip; so, I simply bought a ticket to the next film screening, which turned out to be "I'm Not There", the much hyped Dylan biopic, starring, to my surprise, Heath Ledger. And, so horribly, horribly bored did I become (okay, Dylan fans, take a shot me, why don't you?), I was left to transcend the narrative itself (whatever that was, mind you), and think behind the cameras. "Wow," I mused, "these actors must have thought they were signed on to some counter - Hollywood piece of high art - instead, they all just look trapped in a pretentious farce."

 

Quite frankly, you'd expect nothing less from Cate Blanchett (who compensates for her roles in a variety of shit films, by reminding us, every ten seconds, what an artist she is), who I've never had as much affection for as I'm supposed to have. But it had become clear, over recent years, that Heath Ledger was yet another actor who was torn between the commodity he had become (as a money-spinning heart-throb for the big American studios) and the brooding, oh so "real", artiste that part of him wanted, so desperately, to be. I couldn't help but smirk, at the thought of Ledger's "connection" to the role of Dylan that he was assigned - a brooding cross, between the tortured political artist and a male chauvinist, losing his battle to the monster his celebrity had made him, and resorting to a slightly tiring - rather transparent - rejection of himself as a public figure (but that, Mr Dylan, is what you, after all, chose to become). Ledger chose to become it, too, of course. But he had slowly become a man devoured by the paradox of art and commerce, and of the reality of the actor and the performance. We've seen it all, before. We will, let's face it, see it all, again.

"I wonder what will happen to Heath Ledger?" I pondered, watching him pout about on the screen, rejecting his own stardom. 24 hours later, of course, we would find out.

 

Oh, I'm sorry, did I just drift off the track, from what's supposed to be a review of I'm Not There? It's just that there's been a sudden resurgence of session times of this unfathomably awful film. Gee, I wonder why?! And, let's face it, if you're only now going to watch it, there's no way you can tell me that you will be completely disconnected - like you're supposed to - from the fact that behind the character you're watching on a giant screen, is the famous actor who was lying dead, beside a bottle of sleeping pills, only last week. So, let's cut to the chase, there, shall we?

And the thing is, it's a much more fascinating angle on the experience, than the film is as an angle of Bob bloody Dylan - I almost wish I'd stumbled in, "post-mortem". It's not very often I use the word, "torturous", about a film; but for two hours in Newtown Dendy, I felt like someone had chained me to my seat, and held my eyelids open, as I watched a film designed to bore me to my slow and painful death. I'm not sure if Bob Dylan was "there", but, I assure you, I was - and I felt every single moment of it. And, yes, I suspect this will bring my intellectual credibility into question with many pretentious latte drinkers who wear black rimmed glasses, but so be it. Like all the other lemmings, I'm supposed to hail "I'm Not There" as a work of creative genius. Surely, this film is Art™, darling - it says so, itself, so very clearly. But I, for one (and judging by most reviews, I think I'm the only one), thought this was a tiresome, self-indulgent, impenetrable mess, by - and this is the twist - one of my favourite, favourite directors, Todd Haynes. Get thee to Velvet Goldmine - a much, much better film.

Now, the main retort to my slaughter of this film will be that "I don't get it". Half-way through the film, during one of its many, many - many - pointless music video sequences, we hear Dylan sing the famous lines, "You know something's going on, don't you, Mr Jones? You just don't know what it is."  I instantly shuddered; "Oh, dear God, every bohemian and pseudo-intellectual I know who loved this film is going to use this line as some witty, biting metaphor for my inability to 'get' this profound piece of art." But I think I do know as much about what was going on, with the exception of Dylan fans who would have been more able to decipher the Clever allusions to Dylan lyrics, as the next person in that cinema. I just think it was saying something incredibly vague, and incredibly shallow, as if it was somehow a revelation. It wasn't. And, like Copola's irritating Antoinette escapade into sheer pretense, can we please stop being so seduced by the fluff that is "The point is there is no point"?! Can we? Please? Because it's just pointless. And, yes, that's the point of it, but, well... see what I mean?

The irony put forward so blatantly in "I'm Not There", in case you're intellectually stunted to the point where you couldn't see Haynes' profound paradox (and that probably means your parents are also siblings), is that, if the one factor that defines Dylan is his enigmatic allusiveness - and if the importance his sincerity apparently was to the "cause", etc, was basically centered around the question, "Who is Bob Dylan? Is he really the figure people made of his songs?" - the film answers the question by obscuring the truth of Dylan even further, because he was none of those things, anyway. Or, maybe he was all of them. It's a fine, pretentious line, after all. Never mind that six different actors represent Dylan (ranging from a woman, to a heart-throb, to an ex heart-throb, and even a young black boy), with different names (none of them, Bob Dylan), because, like, wow, man, who is the real Dylan, anyway? Never mind that the film blurs the lines between factual narratives of the real man, and those whose origins, I'd propose, are connected simply to the projections of a certain Mr Todd Haynes. It doesn't matter that it's both fact and fiction, because, I mean, really man, who is the real Bob Dylan, anyway? He is the folk hero - or not. He is the pretentious, difficult scene queen - or not. He is the tortured ladies man of bohemia - or not. He's even a young, negro delinquent (I'm not kidding) and (yes, it gets even better) a lone pioneer of the wild west. Or, maybe he isn't. He's not there! Get it? Do ya? Huh? Thanks, Todd, I'm glad I spent $10 and wasted four hours of my life (including travel time) for you to revel in your silly irony, as if you'd unlocked some great secret to modern culture.

Because, beyond Dylan, this film, make no mistake of it, thinks it's doing just that. Ultimately, Dylan "is" also (in this film, at least) a cultural metaphor, as a kind of portrait of the baby-boomers as doomed idealists who sold their souls and supposed ideologies. If there's any decent conversation to be started by this film, this would be it. But I'm not sure I can credit the film with it, because even though it came across to me as a rather depressing, somewhat scathing, depiction of the baby-boomer generation, I don't think this was really its intention. In fact, I think it's a painful romanticisation - there's an uncomfortable sympathy, there, in the grandiosity of it all. But, even still, it's a shallow example, and there are a hundred better catalysts for this particular cultural contemplation, than this inevitably vacant film.

It doesn't take a genius to figure out that, ultimately, it will be as The Joker, that Heath Ledger will be remembered. I think that's actually a bit sad, because he'll go down for the mainstream powerhouse he actually hated being - I first thought it a shame that this was to be the case (particularly, after watching Batman Begins, this forthcoming film's predecessor - a truly silly, uninspiring piece of shlock). However, next to this one - despite its self-declared label as Art™ - perhaps, that isn't quite so bad a thing. I guess, though, you can kind of imagine, at least, why Ledger thought it such a good idea.

 

However, I cannot forgive Mr Haynes. The world needs good queer film-makers - whether they're delivering "queer" films, or not. But shame on you, Todd. You should know better, than to put your head up your own ass for so long, you end up making a film in it.