Flashback to the Woodstock Film Festival, 2007, and Todd Haynes's "I'm Not There"
Pilgrim on Tinker Street: Desperately Seeking Dylan at the Woodstock Film Festival, 14 October 2007.
There were no more condoms in the Sunflower Natural Foods Market by Sunday afternoon. The empty shelf where they’d been was clearly marked, and looked lonely above the vast selection of cruelty-free, leadless lipsticks I’d gone there to choose from. Had they sold out just because of the big weekend? I asked the mild-looking, long-haired, pleasant kid at the register. He looked at me as if trying to determine my needs. “I don’t know.” Happy smile. “But I’ve got some at home.” Ah, Woodstock. Friendliest of towns for lo these fifty years. And with the Eighth Annual Film Festival in town, showcasing on its final night the Big Music Movie, no wonder some amenities were hard to come by.
Tickets for the last show of the last night were hard to come by, too. They had sold out online very quickly, to the disgust of some local friends in a town where both cellphone signals and laptops get shut out by the Catskills (the sight of movie people shaking their BlackBerries angrily by the village green in the brilliant sunshine could only make you smile). “I’m Not There,” the mockumentary that bobs and weaves all round and about the absent presence of Bob Dylan, has been screened before, and it’s due to open nationally on November 21 in New York. The tiny Tinker Street Cinema is where it belongs, though, and “I’m Not There” should stay right there. A multiplex will crush it like a bug, and Woodstock, where Dylan is still spoken of as a friend and neighbor – and might just still own a big chunk of land, somewhere up Ohayo Mountain – has the requisite kind of audience. That’s to say an audience in which all the members knew something about Dylan, and many of them knew a lot.
All weekend, there were related events that could only have come to pass in this town. The Lotus Gallery on Rock City Road had hung a show of Elliott Landy’s Dylan photographs – tenderly taken, not striving to intrude or redefine, but to entertain the sitters, and to preserve what Wordsworth would call a spot in time. At the opening on a golden Saturday afternoon, you couldn’t see the photos for the people – there was even a Dylan Look-Alike contest, judged by, among others, Mary Lou Paturel, above whose coffeeshop on Tinker Street Bob once lived. Zachary Sluser, a filmmaker from L.A., won the contest because of the Ray-Bans he borrowed from a friend at the last minute (“It’s the glasses,” one judge said to another in their huddle next to me) and the cigarette (“I don’t smoke. I borrowed it,” said Sluser). Landy walked around beaming, welcoming. He seems a kind, modest soul, and when speaking of his photos of Dylan, the Band, and Woodstock (nope, it didn’t happen in town, so don’t ask where the site is), appears grateful to have been in the right place at a right-on time. People were talking about the movie, and what to expect, as they looked into Landy’s capturings of the young face of the man who had agreed to have this family part of his life, among others, opened to a chronicling not his own.
Bob Dylan with the Paturel family, Woodstock,© Douglas R. Gilbert and via Gilbert’s Bob Dylan gallery
Todd Haynes, who had the idea for a biopic of Dylan, gained the needed clearance and authorizations (as he infamously didn’t for his take on Karen Carpenter via Barbie, barred from release by the Carpenter estate), wrote the screenplay, and made the film, wasn’t in Woodstock. His co-producer Christine Vachon said he had “really wanted to be.” Speaking before the screening that Sunday, Vachon felt the vibe, noting “It’s really amazing to show this movie at Woodstock ….This place had a huge effect on the movie you’re about to see.” Quickly she retracted the word “experimental” after applying it – rightly – to “I’m Not There,” and substituted the thought, one she attributed to Haynes, that this is a movie that “you should let wash over you.” And so we settled back to watch the river flow. Vachon also referred to the movie as a “labor of love” just as the screening was beginning. Well, it’s certainly as undefinable, splintered, and abandoned as love.
“I’m Not There” is a series of those tangentially related sketches that are so popular these days – do they save a screenwriter from having to think up and write a whole movie? “Babel” at least entwined the stories of which it was composed, and had them fall together like dominoes. The sketches are a nice cultural comment: our 15-minute attention span (and yes, of course there’s a cameo clip of Warhol in “I’m Not There”) can’t take more. Horton Foote and Howard Koch, Waldo Salt and Robert Bolt, where are you when we need you? Bob Dylan deserves continuity and something at least acquainted with grandeur, not this sort of shotgun approach. Haynes’s movie makes a pattern in your mind like pellets blasted through a door: scattershot, hit and miss, above all no direction home.
The movie begins, upsettingly more than provocatively, with Dylan dead. A good way to ensure freedom in a pseudobiopic, maybe: kill off your star. The Bob avatar who lies first on a table in the morgue, with doctors opening him, that is her, up with scalpels (ok, block that metaphor! We get it: this is going to be a really intense, beneath-the-skin look at Dylan) is the one who looks most like Dylan, Cate Blanchett, playing a character named Jude Quinn. Jude’s footage is in black and white, just like “Dont Look Back” and the rest of the D.A. Pennebaker – well, yes, you may call it the Pennebaker original. Shift scene (in a brutal sudden smash cut; more metaphor and yep, we get it: our heads are supposed to be swimming) to Jude in casket, “nailed by a Peeping Tom,” and a flat stretch of road evidently meant to be Woodstock, where Dylan wrecked his motorcycle in 1967. The audience rustled, murmured, for the straightaway road with no mountains behind it looks nothing like the pertinent landscape. But verisimilitude is the hobgoblin of little minds. Even in what has been advertised as a biopic. We remained quiet and paid attention. One must, or “I’m Not There” is drowning you fast, instead of washing over you.
[read the rest in ISIS, in which it initially appeared in the Winter 2007 issue; and in the book of Dylan essays I’m working on even now]