Wasn’t it at the Free Trade Hall, Manchester, that someone shouted Judas? Hadn’t Dylan already gone electric before he came back to Newport in 1967?
One asks these questions because the act of watching a biopic is one of constant interrogation of the veracity of the purported facts being conveyed. One gets the impression that Mangold and his writer, Jay Cocks, have culled every available source of documented image to lend their film authenticity, but of course, no one truly knows what was said in heated conversations with Joan Baez or Suze Rotolo. And no-one really knows what that early Dylan was thinking or feeling. It’s a lifetime ago and the memories are shrouded in myth and rumour. As Pinter noted, memory is an unreliable companion. So what the biopic generates is more questions than answers, and the more it purports to approximate to the truth of what occurred, the more it probably errs.
All the same, Chalamet does a decent job of imitating Dylan. There was a quote the other day from the man himself about not understanding from whence his lyrics came, as though he was indeed Keats’ nightingale, the song leading the singer, a baffling blessing of genius. This bafflement never surfaces in the film. Dylan remains an enigmatic seer, in tune with his genius, plugged into a higher plane, one which inevitably leads to conflict on the human plane, above all when it comes to the issue of romance, the structural hook on which the film is vaguely hung. That coruscating strangeness is never broached, we never feel as though we begin to explore Dylan as poet, rather than cultural figure mired in the perils of fame and the public eye. This angle is the one the film pursues, an and it does so efficiently, without ever taking the viewer into the more baffling corners of the singer’s brain.
No comments:
Post a Comment