Todd Haynes blows another cloud of mist into the mystique of Bob Dylan. The filmmaker, who once enlisted Barbie dolls to tell the Karen Carpenter story, now borrows a gimmick used by Todd Solondz in Palindromes, employing a rotation of dissimilar actors to play a single role, a multiplication of a gimmick used by Luis Buñuel in That Obscure Object of Desire. (Not a gimmick, in other words, exclusive to filmmakers named Todd.) The fact that Bob Dylan is a real person and a public figure, about whom we may have our own ideas, further complicates matters, and it is easy to lose track of the subject of the film when we are looking at a prepubescent black boy, Marcus Carl Franklin, hopping freight trains in Depression-period hobo-style, or looking at Richard Gere in granny glasses on horseback in the era of the model-T, and all the easier when they are masquerading under the aliases of Woody Guthrie and Billy the Kid, respectively. The songs in the film (sometimes sung by Dylan himself, sometimes by others) leave no doubt as to the protagonist's identity, and no doubt as to his uniqueness, but between the half-dozen different faces and pseudonyms, the film seems to be not so much about the "many lives of Bob Dylan" as about a half-dozen different lives altogether. The elusiveness of the man, the multifacetedness of him, would presumably be The Point, but that point could have been made more subtly: the dissimilarity of Marcus Carl Franklin and Richard Gere amounts to gross overstatement. Adding to the confusion is a visual patchwork stitched together out of grainy black-and-white, glossy black-and-white, jaundiced color, and peachy color (Edward Lachman, cinematographer), not even counting the diverse cinematic allusions, catch them if you can, to Fellini, Godard, Peckinpah. With Christian Bale (who gets the speaking voice, the cadence, just right), Cate Blanchett (who additionally, cross-dressingly, gets the look just right), Ben Winshaw, Heath Ledger, and Charlotte Gainsbourg. (2007) — Duncan Shepherd
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