You could argue that I’m Not There is one of the greatest of all Hollywood biopics, only that’s not quite what it is. It is wonderfully bold and a dazzling piece of fractured storytelling, but it isn’t exactly a biopic – more a meta-biopic, perhaps. Todd Haynes’s very personal take on an artist’s life is, as the opening credits inform us, “inspired by the music and many lives of Bob Dylan”; its challenging central idea is to have Dylan played at six different stages of his career by six different actors.
Long before the film’s release, this aspect of the story attracted attention but it is no mere gimmick. As the film progresses and the six strands interweave or crash into one another, so the idea makes ever greater sense. Dylan really has presented discrete personae to the world, repeatedly changing and reinventing himself, and changing popular music in the process. He became a prominent public figure and then withdrew, being by turns verbose or taciturn, but always wilfully enigmatic.
So Haynes breaks his hero down into six emblematically named characters. There’s Woody (a wonderful performance from Marcus Carl Franklin), a young black boy riding the rails in the late 1950s, apparently convinced that it’s the height of the Depression and that he is in fact Woody Guthrie – his guitar is daubed with Guthrie’s famous line “This machine kills fascists”. The young aphorism-spouting, poetic, Rimbaud-wannabe Dylan appears in the form of Arthur (Ben Wishaw), much of whose dialogue, delivered blankly straight to camera, is familiar from Dylan’s appearances at press conferences in the 1960s. Christian Bale is Jack, Dylan the rock star, who is later born again as the world weary, God-fearing Pastor John. Dylan the heart-throb, lover and father is shown via Robbie (Heath Ledger).
The elusive Dylan, the post-motorbike-crash recluse and writer of defiantly obscure lyrics, is presented as Billy the Kid (Richard Gere) – but a version of the mythical character who somehow evaded death at the hands of Pat Garrett and wandered a weird Western landscape populated with oddballs who address one another through Dylan lyrics of the late 1960s and early 1970s. All of this is interesting, much of it compelling, but the film approaches the sublime in the scenes dealing with the Dylan of the mid-1960s, where he becomes Jude (Cate Blanchett, who has never been better). This section, much of it lifted from the brilliant tour movie Don’t Look Back, sees Jude’s struggle to retain sanity and integrity while at the heart of a storm of drugs and artistic re-invention presented as a dream-like altered reality. Haynes, a master of pastiche, is here apparently inspired by the Fellini-pastiche that is Woody Allen’s dark satire Stardust Memories.
Haynes has already attempted the rock movie à clef with mixed results in Velvet Goldmine, but here he pulls it off in bravura style. (A big help this time round is that he was allowed to use his subject’s own music – the glam stars celebrated in VG refused permission for theirs to be used.) In fact this works so well that long before the end you don’t merely accept the use of these wildly diverse personae, but you may also even wonder whether Dylan’s story could properly be told any other way. The music is almost entirely made up of original Dylan numbers, although anyone dutiful enough to sit through the final credits will be rewarded with Antony and the Johnsons’ exquisite cover of “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door”.
One’s dim, rosy recollection of the original St Trinian’s films of the 1950s and 1960s is spoiled somewhat when one catches them again on TV or DVD. In truth they are pretty uneven affairs illuminated by the presence of Alastair Sim, Joyce Grenfell and George Cole. An unsuccessful attempt was made to revive the series in the 1980s and now for some reason directors Oliver Parker and Barnaby Thompson – responsible for the movies An Ideal Husband and Spiceworld respectively – have been tempted to update the story of the school for scandalous girls. What attracted them or their fine cast – Rupert Everett, Colin Firth, Celia Imrie – remains a mystery, as does the target audience: no girl or boy over the age of 12 would be attracted by anything so puerile, while its UK certificate and occasionally risqué subject matter rule out under-12s.
Like St Trinian’s, Alvin and the Chipmunks, a live-action/CGI hybrid, is an update of a children’s favourite from the 1950s, and it too is packed with fart gags and other infantile humour. But unlike St Trinian’s, this is an endearing effort that will appeal to under-10s with its slight tale of the three all-talking, all-singing rodents who find a father figure in the form of Jason Lee, the loveable goofball familiar from TV’s My Name Is Earl.
The most interesting, just about, of the three films opening, rather discreetly, on Boxing Day is Closing the Ring. It’s good to see that the octogenarian Richard Attenborough is still turning out movies, although this flaccid tale of love and war whose story spans 50 years, starting from the second world war and unfolding on both sides of the Atlantic, is one of his least distinguished efforts.
Princesses opens in promising style as we are introduced to our two leading characters, Caye and Zulema, prostitutes walking the streets of Madrid. Caye has so far managed to keep the truth of her working life from her bourgeois family, a family used to secrets and lies, while Zulema is plying her trade to support her son back in the Dominican Republic. It starts out in fairly tough style, but soon starts to pull its punches. Somehow director Fernando Leon de Aranoa doesn’t make prostitution seem like such a bad option and ultimately his film is tonally similar to, although vastly less entertaining than, Pretty Woman.
Table tennis enjoyed something of a cultural renaissance after Howard Jacobson’s semi-autobiographical novel The Mighty Walzer, but all this work is undone at a stroke by the appalling Balls of Fury . Viewers shouldn’t be fooled by Christopher Walken’s appearance as the villain of the piece into thinking that Robert Ben Garant’s movie has any real merit, although Walken does supply the closest thing to a moment of any distinction with a half-decent line about his jungle lair. Sufficient warning of the project’s pedigree comes with the news that it is created by some of the people responsible for Reno 911!: Miami, which, despite fierce competition from Balls of Fury, holds on to its position as the year’s lamest comedy.
