a complete unknown (w&d. james mangold, w. jay cocks)

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.

silence (w&d. scorsese, w. jay cocks)

In the final ten minutes of Silence we get a glimpse of what the film might have been like had it been made when its director was at his peak. From nowhere a narrator appears, a Dutch merchant. The story begins to be told through the interplay of narration and image. The acting complements the storytelling, rather than trying to drive it. The film isn’t dependent on reaching those minor climaxes which are now known as ‘beats’ in the language of screenwriting. Rather, the film finds its own pace, skipping over years of real time in minutes of film time, picking out details which elucidate the world the characters inhabit (16th century Japan). There’s no need to try to win the audience with a comic character; there’s a confidence and fluidity which the rest of the film, all two hours and a quarter, signally lacks. 

Why the rest of film cannot retrospectively follow in the footsteps of its ending is a mystery. The script feels like it has been assembled by robots, the acting feels as though it’s being performed by robots, the art design is uneven and prompts more questions than it answers, consistently leaving us wondering whether what we’re seeing has even a grain of authenticity or if this is all some Hollywood dream. Even the editing and camerawork, so often fallback staples of Scorsese’s work, feel lacklustre. There must be a metaphor lurking behind the decline of Scorsese as a filmmaker. Maybe it’s just old age. Maybe the industry has wrong-footed him. It certainly feels surprising that the script for Silence, supposedly a passion project of the director’s for decades, is quite so wooden. It smacks of unnamed figures being drafted in to “help”.  

I had missed Silence when it came out in London. But looking for a suitable English language film in Brasilia, it seemed like it might be a safe enough bet. The cinema was a third full. People munched popcorn with enormous vigour. No-one walked out. Whenever the comic character appeared, people laughed. Perhaps there was something that my take on the film had failed to grasp; after all it's no small feat to convince people around the world to munch their popcorn whilst watching an epic about Jesuit priests in medieval Japan. All the same, until we got to the last fifteen minutes, Silence never felt like a Scorsese film to me.