1.
... say for sure. I'm Not There might be Todd Haynes' best film. It's the film Velvet Goldmine had the potential to be and the film Across the Universe thinks it is. It's a rock film that manages to make clichés (the troubled pop star, the drug-addled tour, the unfaithful marriage) seem fresh again.
4.
... to see it twice in two days. It's one of the only films I've seen for which I can say that I wish it was 8 hours long. I would have sat there for days if it meant more time in the presence of one of the most unique and challenging American filmmakers to ...
26.
... full of acting revelations, the most understated and sublime of all is Charlotte Gainsbourg, who gives a largely wordless performance worthy of the greats of the silent ...
17.
... person or persons claiming the ability to be able to encapsulate a Todd Haynes film in a short piece is a liar. It takes 200 words just to explain the basic plot, leaving you scrambling to find something intelligent to say about the stuff that matters. It's impossible; I won't even try. You can find that stuff in other ...
39.
... following mathematical analogy: the narratives do not add to each other; it's more like multiplication, a problem filled with exponents and factorials and multiple variables, a rapidly expanding force that ... theory of any kind somehow stands dumb in its presence, doesn't it? And yet ...
42.
... say that his narrative device perfectly captures the fragmented personality of a scrutinized star like Dylan is both entirely accurate and completely superficial. Yes, it's true, but it's also so basic compared to the depth of treasures that Haynes has placed ...
51.
... thing to say about this film is that what each story lacks in clarity or fullness is provided by another story. The parts compose the whole piece, but the whole film is something far greater, a full statement, a complete and connected narrative.
8.
... as disarming and defamiliarizing as Dylan's music. While all of it looks like a movie (or five or six), it somehow never has the feel of any film that's come before it. You catch glimpses of the familiar, but as soon as you recognize them, they've changed on you into something much more uncomfortable, something much more dangerous, something ...
84.
... filled with some of the most heartfelt (and heartwrenching) moments imaginable. Gere's segment is the least accessible but also the most vital, and once your head is able to wrap itself around it, its implications for the whole piece go to work on you, and it's here where I became overwhelmed by the film's emotional statement. As much as everyone, especially the misunderstood artist, wants to retreat from the pain and superficiality of the world, the world is inescapable; there is no retreat; something is going to yank us out of fantasyland and into reality. For Haynes, and for Dylan, it is humanity that pulls us back to the material from the ethereal cabin in the woods. The emotions and the beauty of people are impossible to ignore, and even if the results of getting involved make us vulnerable to tremendous pain, we have no choice but to endure, for somewhere in all that mess lies the ...
0.
... will love this movie. People will hate this movie. But so what? In a cinematic climate that seems to demand accessibility, comfort, and simplistic perfection in its self-conscious "serious" films, I'm Not There is bound to ruffle some feathers. But it's the kind of feather-ruffling that is good for cinema. It's good to get pissed off at a movie that's trying something new. Nothing gets changed by having people tell us what we already know. Like Dylan, the film transcends opinion, replacing it with an integrity of its own, one that gives little thought to an outside response. After all, how can it be responsible for what other people think? It's hard enough for the work to be responsible for itself. This is the very essence of I'm Not There. How it manages to articulate something so elusive and confounding so clearly and with such emotion and deranged beauty I can't ...