johnpmoseley

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.

I love great arthouse cinema, but I don't love this or most of Lanthimos's output, and I'm even tempted to call it fake arthouse. I doubt I can really make that stick, but I'm willing to try. It's something to do with the weird, blank way the characters behave in Lanthimos and screenwriting partner Efthimis Filippou's scenarios . Unlike comparable stylisations in the works of say, Harold Pinter, David Mamet or, I dunno, Kafka, it doesn't seem much more than a lazy trick to keep things zany. People really are weird, but to capture that you've got to pay attention. Lanthimos's weirdness feels unreal and unearned - cheap, we might say, since a lot of this is meant to be funny, and when I saw this in a well-populated cinema, the laughs were few. Willem Dafoe rises from a sofa and turns out to be wearing a pair of anomalous shorts. Emma Stone decries another character's lack of humility before roaring off in an ostentatious muscle car. It feels like cinema designed to appeal to people whose biggest compliment, always uttered in delightedly bewildered upspeak, is 'random' and who don't even know how nihilistic and despairing that is. It feels like the people who made it are aping the idiosyncracies of genuine arthouse without either knowing how to do the substance or, maybe, even being aware that substance is possible.

To try to give the substance its due: all the three stories appear to be trying to talk about people giving up control to others.

The first and most solid is a demanding boss situation so heightened that the orders cover the employee's every life decision and are both whimsical and ultimately horrifying. We are close here to the themes of Kafka's Trial and Castle, as well as to those of of the absurdist dramatists like Beckett and Genet who followed. For me to be interested almost a century after Kafka, I want the themes expanded and updated. That doesn't happen, but the story does at least work on its own terms.

The other two narratives, on the other hand, seem to me to have flaws so basic that, if not for the carte-blanche afforded by Lanthimos's box-office chops and, it seems, just being arthouse, they would surely have been been stripped out by notes in the ordinary development-hell way of things, and the control theme in both the latter stories is being used to drive plots that have nothing of interest to say about it.

Story 2, about a woman whose husband believes she has been replaced by a double, contains further unreasonable demands, but they are so extreme and daffy that it was impossible for me to imagine the woman acceding to them rather than calling the husband's psychiatrist. I felt like walking out at this point and couldn't quite tell whether it was because of the horror of what she felt she had to do or the stupidity of treating the situation like a genuine predicament. As I was thinking this over, someone actually did leave.

Story 3, about cult members seeking a woman with the power to raise the dead, is better, but leads to a would-be twist ending that has been signposted so heavily - by one of the movie's quirky details - that it came, to me at least, as no surprise at all. More gag-writing failure.

For people who like this movie, I say, please, if you haven't, check out some actual classics of surrealist and absurdists cinema, literature and drama: Chien Andalou and The Discrete Charm of the Bourgeoisie (and lots more besides by Buñuel), After Hours, Molloy, Waiting for Godot, The Birthday Party (there's a great William Friedkin film version), The Maids, Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, The Nose, The Double, Ghost Sonata, the aforementioned Kafka novels, and even Lanthimos's one bullseye up to now, The Lobster. If you still think the rest of Lanthimos's output is up to snuff after that, then, I guess, go with God - even if the foundational point of absurdism is that he doesn't exist.