johnpmoseley

It's a perennial question in philosophy and sociology: what would humanity be if freed from material problems? Would we become like the most virtuous of Eric Rohmer characters, giving life over to long-winded but beautifully phrased bouts of self-examination and theory, or would we be like JG Ballard characters and start killing one another for sport?

Trier inadvertently gives us the likely real answer: a numbing mulch of confused pleasures and dissatisfactions without any sufficiency of compelling incentive to find one's way out of it. Not a bad point if it was being made deliberately, but it seems to me the problem is as much the film's and the filmaker's as it is that of the protagonist.

My only proviso to that is the possibility that, in seeming not to know what he wants to say, at bottom, one might Freudianly posit, Trier knew all too well. Why is the main character the worst person in the world? Because she couldn't just settle for a quiet happy life with her older, more successful boyfriend, who made his name with a sexist comic strip that fell victim to political correctness? Ungrateful girl! Ungrateful girls of the new society! Not to worry, fate rebukes her in the form of the ex's fatal cancer. It's almost as if she caused it, and as if he's some kind of martyr.

Yet very little else in the movie suggests the protagonist is really so bad and nor is there any exploration that I can see of the idea that the title might be her own unfair assessment of herself. We're back to the confused mulch, which, for me, is the dominant tendency. I think I'd even prefer it if the thing was some kind of angry anti-woke statement, if it was at least coherent and forceful.

That's a 'stray observation' that went longer than I meant it to. Here's another: watch out for dream sequences. The best movies function like dreams themselves. Dream sequences, on the other hand, feel like an indicator that the filmmaker may have failed to weave a more encompassing spell. That's what I feel happened here.

I watched this last night and tonight I think I'll watch it again. It has me under a spell. Brilliant performances, direction and writing and a perfect biopic title - or maybe the perfect title for an anti-biopic. The subject of these things is never there, never in them or graspable by them, and the usual implicit claim to an accurate depiction is always boringly reductive. Furthermore, in this case, the movie argues, maybe the little we can know of Dylan is that even when he was physically present, he wasn't there in the fantasies people concocted of him, and was always trying to outrun them. One such concoction within the movie is another biopic, said to be a disappointment.

This logic and the series of personae to which it gives rise, each one a way of slipping the bonds of the last, each played by a different actor, is also a good way of relating the biography - with Dylanesque poetic license. It's like 'Negative Capability - the Movie' - so maybe no accident that one of the actors playing a Dylan here is Ben Whishaw, who'd earlier played Keats in Jane Campion's Bright Star.

If people have liked the Gere section least, it might be because it's hardest to find the theme there, though it might all be metaphor at this point: he wears a mask and breaks out of a jail, then leaves a doomed town he's said he intends to die in. Don't look back. Elsewhere, especially the Blanchett sections, the issue of who you're expected to be is always front and centre.

Does it matter and is it enough to make a movie? To me it does and is. I don't have an adoring/projecting public, but this stuff still drives me a little nuts, the pressure to be and speak clearer than things actually are. Pace Eliot, in a line that could be Dylan's: 'I gotta use words when I talk to you.' And Dickinson: 'How dreary to be somebody.' At one point one of the Dylans even gives his name as Arthur Rimbaud, the poet who said, 'I is another.'

As it happens, I also seem to have been a different person when this came out, at which point I saw it and disliked most of it except the Blanchett sections. They still seem best to me, but I love the rest now too. Bale does amazing work with a less showy role than Blanchett's, and the youngest Dylan, Marcus Carl Franklin, 14 when the movie came out, was brilliant too.

No IMDB credit for Franklin since 2015 and I hope that's out of choice and not because things went sour for him. He deserved a huge career if he wanted it. Maybe it's just that he too felt disinclined to be somebody.

What if human physiology changed - evolved if you will - so people could eat plastic? There's an obvious benefit, as one character points out: it would rid the world of a great deal of polluting waste. This is the story of one such evolving human coming to this realisation, against the idea that it's something he must resist even if doing so causes him huge suffering.

But why does it need to be such a slog? Why should the police be trying to prevent the change? You can see it all might be a little disturbing, but it's just not that big a deal.

That's one reason, I think, why this movie's kind of a bore. The other is that the dialogue is over-written in two ways, both too fancy and literary, and too convoluted in explaining what's going on.

And then, despite all the detailed exposition, the movie dashes past a key piece of illogic: a child Lamarckianly evolving as a result of surgical interventions in the previous generation. Mortensen's character points out the fallacy and his respondent deals with it by raising his voice, not making an argument. That's not even the only thing not quite worked out here, but it's the most glaring.