A Complete Unknown

 

Director James Mangold

Dylan in Columbia Studios, 1965

recreation of Cafe Wha? nightclub on MacDougal Street

The director on the set with Timothée Chalamet

The director with Monica Barbaro

Timothée Chalamet on his infamous motorcycle

A COMPLETE UNKNOWN            B                                                                                    USA  (141 mi)  2024  ‘Scope  d: James Mangold

Once upon a time you dressed so fine
Threw the bums a dime in your prime, didn’t you?
People call say ‘beware doll, you’re bound to fall’
You thought they were all kidding you
You used to laugh about
Everybody that was hanging out
Now you don’t talk so loud
Now you don’t seem so proud
About having to be scrounging your next meal

How does it feel, how does it feel?                                                                                                To be without a home                                                                                                                  Like a complete unknown,                                                                                                              Like a rolling stone?                                                                                                                        —excerpt from Like a Rolling Stone, Bob Dylan, 1965, Bob Dylan - Like A Rolling Stone (Live at Newport 1965) YouTube (6:12)

Taking a deep dive back into the early 60’s, which spawned an entire generation, this is essentially a time capsule reflecting the Cuban missile crisis, the Kennedy assassination, and the Civil Rights movement, where linking it all together was the music and cultural impact of Bob Dylan, as his music was everywhere, literally everywhere you turned at the time, with stories continually being written about him, where he was described as “the voice of a generation.” The first songwriter to win the Nobel prize for literature in 2016 since Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore in 1913, it’s his prolific output of poetic, counterculture songs that become the focus of the film, not any biographical portrait, but one that allows his enigmatic yet elegiac lyrics to speak for him, many songs allowed to unravel in their entirety, as unlike the traditional lyrics that came before him, his songs and lyrics were highly personal.  Revered and idolized, becoming the poster child for the 60’s counterculture movement with songs like Blowin’ in the Wind, Blowing In The Wind (Live On TV, March 1963) YouTube (2:35) and A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall, Bob Dylan A Hard Rain's A Gonna Fall (5:59) from 1962, Masters of War, Bob Dylan - Masters of War (4:30) from 1963, and The Times They Are a-Changin’, Bob Dylan - The Times They Are a-Changin' [LIVE IN ... YouTube (3:28) from 1964, which were able to influence a generation with deeply profound lyrics that blended a stream-of-conscious, image-laden lyricism with the traditional folksy sound.  By the time the free love movement was in full swing in the late 60’s, Bob Dylan's words were anthems for peace, and Dylan had become the voice of a social movement, elevated to an oracle of 1960’s youth culture.  Largely due to his connections with Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, Dylan embodied the ideals of the folk revival, a young teenage drifter arriving from the Midwest, singing traditional songs he had learned in his travels and writing new songs about the trials, troubles, and tribulations of the world around him, yet most revered were his songs of social consciousness, which were labeled protest songs, a term he disdained, yet as the children of the Sixties tried to crown Bob Dylan their poet laureate, he refused, as he was that rare celebrity who scoffed at all attempts to exaggerate his importance.  He didn’t even play at Woodstock, although he lived there.  In his 2004 memoir, Chronicles, Dylan complained of how “rogue radicals looking for the Prince of Protest” showed up in Woodstock.  He said he “had very little in common with and knew even less about a generation that I was supposed to be the voice of.” (Newsweek cover: Bob Dylan opens up; Exclusive book excerpt ...).  But like a hipster alienated by his rejection of the mainstream, Dylan remained the voice of a generation precisely by refusing, and what this film brilliantly captures is his essential unknowability, making this a fascinating watch.  Shot in ‘Scope by Phedon Papamichael Jr. on various locations in New Jersey recreating the small clubs in New York’s Greenwich Village of the 60’s, adapted by Mangold and Jay Cocks, who has worked with Martin Scorsese and been a critic for Rolling Stone magazine, from Elijah Wald’s 2015 book Dylan Goes Electric! Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night That Split the Sixties, an author who earlier wrote How the Beatles Destroyed Rock ‘n’ Roll (2009) and co-authored Dave Van Ronk’s memoir, The Mayor of MacDougal Street (2005).  It may come as a surprise to some that more young people today have probably seen actor Timothée Chalamet on social media or in his movies than have ever seen Bob Dylan in his lifetime, which is hard to imagine for a performer who has been playing in front of audiences for over 60 years.  As the film kept getting pushed back from 2020 due to Covid and then the Actors’ strike, it gave Chalamet several years to learn the subtle nuances of not just how to sing and talk like Dylan, fully inhabiting his sullen presence, but also learn to play the guitar and harmonica.

While the definitive Dylan movie remains D. A. Pennebaker’s Don't Look Back (1967), other contenders are Dylan as an actor in Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid (1973), Martin Scorsese’s exhaustively researched No Direction Home: Bob Dylan (2005), and a few oddball movies like Todd Haynes’ abstract rendition in I’M NOT THERE (2007), which uses multiple actors to portray Dylan’s different public personas without ever mentioning him by name, or showing up rather anonymously where we least expect to find him in the struggling folk scene depicted in the Coen brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis (2012).  While the acting performances are surprisingly good, especially Timothée Chalamet doing his Brandoesque mumbling imitation of Dylan, as his singing while playing guitar on all songs recorded live brings that same rough edge, while in contrast, Jamie Foxx won an Oscar for lip syncing Ray Charles, and Rami Malek won an Oscar for lip syncing Queen’s Freddie Mercury.  Edward Norton is the infinitely likeable, venerable folk legend Pete Seeger, where much of this version of Dylan is seen through his lofty eyes, while Monica Barbaro plays a sensuously feisty version of accomplished folk star Joan Baez, and Elle Fanning is his underappreciated girlfriend of the time Sylvie Russo, based on artist and activist Suze Rotolo, one of the few characters in his inner circle who remained out of the spotlight, seen on the cover of the 1963 album The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan and author of the 2008 memoir A Freewheelin’ Time, which was used as source material.  It’s worth mentioning that some of Dylan’s best work was conceived when they were together, as she obviously had a great influence on his state of mind, yet she’s never gotten the credit she deserves for shaping Dylan and his work.  In the two-and-a-half years they dated he wrote most of his overtly political songs, where the politics, in particular, were hers, as her parents were members of the Communist Party, while she was a full-time volunteer with CORE (Congress of Racial Equality), the anti-nuclear group SANE, and she also worked on a production of songs by Bertolt Brecht, which made a lasting impact on Dylan’s writing.  While it’s clear she was the inspiration behind some of his best love songs, she also witnessed his complete transformation from a relatively obscure folk performer playing in small, intimate spaces to a massively recognizable celebrity who couldn’t go anywhere in public without being mobbed by frenzied fans, which left her conflicted, as the internalized tension it caused took its toll on their relationship, A COMPLETE UNKNOWN | "One of a Kind" Official Clip ... YouTube (1:14).  The 1960’s were a period of dramatic upheaval, where the optimism of the early decade had been shaken by an escalating series of murders, assassinations, and riots, something this film never addresses, and is instead merely a historical backdrop.  Made by the man who directed the wildly uneven yet fully entertaining Johnny Cash biopic WALK THE LINE (2005) starring Joaquin Phoenix, where we see some stylistic parallels, but the one real disappointment with this movie is the conventional, straightforward manner in which it is told, where it resembles a linear progression of Dylan writing his own music, getting discovered, recording his first album, finding an interesting girlfriend, discovering his new electric sound, clashing with the establishment, so there are no real surprises, though it does take some manufactured artistic liberties, continuing a long line of mythical Hollywood fictionalizations.  While Dylan is an artist in development who remains closely guarded and seemingly impenetrable with a strangely magnetic persona, where his internal world is an open question, hiding behind a self-mythologizing mask of fictionalized construction, which may be frustrating to some, yet even today the man behind the curtain remains an indecipherable mystery that was never meant to be unraveled, so we learn very little about a man this film is ostensibly about.  In Scorsese’s ROLLING THUNDER REVIEW (2019), Dylan is famous for re-iterating a George Bernard Shaw quote, “Life isn’t about finding yourself, it’s about creating yourself.”  Anyone familiar with his early years can recognize that this movie doesn’t have that sneering intellectual arrogance and disdain that was so prevalent in D. A. Pennebaker’s Don't Look Back (1967), instead there are early signs of what to expect, including that everpresent motorcycle, which is a character in itself foreshadowing what’s to come (50 years later, Dylan's motorcycle crash remains mysterious).    

In the opening sequence, Dylan (Chalamet) arrives in New York City in search of his boyhood idol Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNary), who was suffering from Huntington’s Disease, an incurable neurodegenerative disease, unable to control his muscles or speech, visiting him at the Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital in New Jersey, where he actually sang a song written specifically for him, A Complete Unknown | "Song To Woody” by Timothée Chalamet YouTube (2:20), with Woody expressing approval by pounding the bedside with his fist.  Also in the room was Pete Seeger, who immediately befriended the young man, introducing him to the folk music scene where his star rises, as evidenced by his act following Joan Baez, but as she was leaving, she stopped to take a listen, utterly flabbergasted by what she was hearing.  They would eventually become lovers, even going on tour together, though by that time it had largely deteriorated into insults or ignoring one another.  But their first night together is memorable, as she immediately sees through his bullshit, though his ability to write lyrics was simply astonishing, Blowin In The Wind Scene | A COMPLETE UNKNOWN (2024 ... YouTube (4:50).   Much of the film deals with Dylan’s mystique, acerbic and socially awkward, as he’s an enigma that simply cannot be understood, which is essentially the subject of Pennebaker’s Don't Look Back, and that any attempt to do so forces him into yet another epic transformation into something else, where the closest we can get to him is through his music, privileging the craft of songwriting and musical experimentation in a way that few musical biopics ever do.  With wall-to-wall music, this film loads up on scenes of musical performances taking place in bedrooms, hotel rooms, small venues, festivals, and recording sessions, where the effect he had on his generation is staggering, yet mostly he wanted no part of it, losing himself in the process of continually discovering new innovations, not robotically repeating the same songs over and over again, which is what the public wanted, and the blueprint for how stars achieve commercial success.  This conflict is the core of the movie. whether it’s relationships or musical choices, as Dylan felt trapped by his fame, and simply refused to be pigeonholed into what others expected him to be.  He was not interested in being the white knight of his generation, a balladeer who conveniently sang songs for every occasion, spurring social change through the eloquent and often prophetic construction of his lyrics, reflected in the ominous lyric, “He not busy being born is busy dying” from It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding) YouTube (7:28).  This film concentrates on a few short early years and ignores the rest, as by the time the film ends he has broken free of all expectations and finally discovered he is on his own, able to sing what he wants with whoever he enjoys playing with, but it came as a shock, like a rupture in an existing reality, which is exactly how he was perceived when he brought electric guitars to the conventionally acoustic Newport Folk Festival in 1965, backed by members of the Butterfield Blues Band, instructing them to “play it loud,” described in the book as “the night that split the 60’s.”  “I try my best to be just like I am, but everybody wants you to be just like them,” sang Dylan on Maggie’s Farm, Bob Dylan - Maggie's Farm (Live At Newport Folk Festival ... YouTube (4:59), bringing the house down in a chaotic chorus of boos and catcalls and objects thrown onstage, where even a fight breaks out in this version, exposing the tensions between traditional and groundbreaking new music, where it’s easy to forget that Lightnin’ Hopkins, the Chambers Brothers, and the Paul Butterfield Blues Band had previously played electric sets at Newport that very same weekend, so it was essentially a battle of one nonconformist group against another, a dispute about what it meant to rebel against convention, heralding the death of a leftist movement rooted in progressive folk ideals.  According to Elijah Wald’s book, Dylan triggered “the end of the folk revival as a mass movement and the birth of rock as the mature artistic voice of a generation,” ending the set with “Strike another match, go start anew” from a final acoustic song, Bob Dylan - It's All Over Now, Baby Blue (Live at the Newport ... YouTube (4:35), but the experience jettisoned him into the future on his own terms, announcing his arrival as a complex, uncompromising artist.            

Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night That Split the Sixties  Elijah Wald book excerpt from Pitchfork

The Beguiled (2017)

THE BEGUILED                   C+                  

USA  (93 mi)  2017 d:  Sofia Coppola                       Official Facebook

Ostensibly a remake or retelling of an early Clint Eastwood film directed by Don Siegel, The Beguiled (1971), that rare Eastwood movie where he actually gets his comeuppance, and from none other than stage icon Geraldine Page, though one would think this is more heavily influenced by the gorgeously stylized Peter Weir film Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), one of the most spectacularly beautiful films ever made, described as a turn of the century costume drama about the heavily repressed world of girls at a boarding school, “a magnificently sensuous and stunningly visualized film balancing the beauty of young innocent girls against the beauty of nature, which seems to be so beguiling on the outside, green and yellow flora, pastel colored flowers contrasted against the repression of the Victorian era and the unseen, inexplicable and savage side of nature where terror lurks underneath the surface, and where the two seem worlds apart.”  Weir’s film is the same cloistered territory Sofia Coppola enters with her new film, finding the sexually repressed secrets that lie buried under the surface of her socially isolated Southern belles, offering a sharp contrast to the lurid beauty of the Gothic Expressionism in the plantation era of the South during the Civil War.  The lack of a contemporary musical soundtrack is perhaps the biggest departure from Coppola’s earlier work, while also missing is the non-narrative, stream-of-conscious experimental style she is known for, usually finding gentler pleasures in subtleties and poetic tonalities.  But the film works in another way as well, though perhaps inadvertently.  In an era of Trump, by ignoring historical realities altogether, Coppola has made the ultimate film about white privilege, and done so by throwing out any hint of slavery from the storyline, a conscious effort on Coppola’s part, claiming she didn’t want to treat the subject lightly, suggesting her take was about the gender dynamics of the Confederacy, not the racial ones (Sofia Coppola Says “The Beguiled” Is About The Gender Dynamics Of ...), despite the overt presence of a slave character in both the book it was adapted from, a novel written by Thomas P. Cullinan in 1966, and the previous film, where a slave named Hallie (Mae Mercer) is charged with caring for Eastwood as he heals from a serious injury, and is perhaps the only one not dazzled by his erotic charms, realizing whatever status or privilege available to the other women are not offered to her.  By simply excising the existence of slaves from the story, Coppola has done exactly what Trump has done, cater exclusively to a white audience.  While it may be a major misstep on her part, it feeds into the criticism that she can only make films about the white experience, where nothing that she offers speaks to people of color.  In setting the film during the Civil War, this just feels like a huge limitation on her part, though it may actually reflect the state of mind of Southern whites living in that era, who viewed slaves as property, as something less than human, yet ironically this class advantage reserved for whites was totally dependent upon a slavery system of free labor that remained the foundation of their very existence.  It would be so much more “beguiling” had the director actually dealt with this issue in some prominent fashion rather than to simply ignore it altogether, but to do so really speaks of her own white privilege.    

That being said, this is easily Ms. Coppola’s least challenging and most conventional effort, suggesting this will likely pave the way for her biggest commercial success, though it is arguably among her weakest efforts, despite having its premiere at Cannes, with Coppola strangely and mysteriously winning the award for Best Director, only the second female director to win the prize in the festival’s 70-year history, the only other being Soviet filmmaker Yuliya Solntseva in 1961 for THE CHRONICLE OF FLAMING YEARS.  The last time Coppola competed for the Palme d’Or was in 2006 with MARIE ANTOINETTE when she was famously booed off the stage.  While Cannes juries have been suspect in their choices lately, ignoring Maren Ade’s hilarious and remarkably inventive German tragi-comedy Toni Erdmann (2016) in the previous year in favor of Ken Loach’s utterly conventional I, Daniel Blake (2016).  It appears that jury blew the chance to highlight a leading female director whose bold film and unorthodox direction was head and shoulders above the others, so the next year, perhaps guilt-ridden for slighting women through the years, they pick one of the three women with films in competition, but picked the wrong woman, as Lynne Ramsay was the better choice with her film YOU WERE NEVER REALLY HERE (2017), receiving a 7-minute standing ovation, with critics particularly lauding her direction, but she was instead awarded Best Screenplay, with lead actor Joaquin Phoenix winning Best Actor.  Little of this actually makes any sense.  Coppola’s film is to be commended for the gorgeous stylization of Southern Gothic, with cinematographer Philippe Le Lourd the real stand-out for capturing the picturesque look, creating an interior mood using only candlelight, recalling Kubrick’s BARRY LYNDON (1975), but the film fails to address why she chose to remake the earlier film, as it is questionable whether she actually improves upon the original, and one would have to think it doesn’t.  Siegel’s film is about sexual hysteria, accenting the swirling melodrama that exists when a wounded Union soldier recovers from his wounds in a Confederate all-girl school, where he flirts and stokes the flame of their repressed sexual desires, making them all swoon at the very sight of having a man on the premises.  While Siegel’s film depicts the point of view of Eastwood’s easy charm and male bravado, it doesn’t in the least slight the women’s point of view, or the slave for that matter, as the film is really a battle of the sexes, where the drama comes to a head when both positions are challenged.  Coppola’s film lacks that balance, and instead depicts the story purely from a woman’s view, where it’s actually more comical, surprisingly, but lacks the physical brutality, exaggerated delirium, and depth of performance in the original, both male and female, as who can match the towering power of the great Geraldine Page, who is at her most devious in the role when confronting Eastwood.  Coppola’s film doesn’t really hold a candle to the original, largely due to its own timidity and lack of spark between Nicole Kidman and Colin Farrell, though it is immaculately photographed.  

With much of this playing out like a fairy tale, Coppola has chosen to bathe her film in a soft light, actually resembling the look of old, faded photographs, with the sound of gunshots and explosions continually heard off in the distance.  Set in Virginia during the Civil War, with 12-year old Amy (Oona Laurence), a young girl alone in the woods searching for mushrooms, this could be a variation of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, as she quickly encounters the metaphorical wolf in Colin Farrell, Corporal John McBurney, a wounded Union soldier bleeding profusely from a gunshot wound in his leg, where she helps walk him to the sanctuary of the Farnsworth Seminary for Young Ladies, an all-girls boarding school run by Miss Martha Farnsworth (Nicole Kidman, whose lurid backstory is also omitted).  Once safely inside, he becomes a curiosity, with all eyes gazing upon him as if descended from the celestial skies, where each seems wrapped in their own internalized fantasy of how they see this man.  Some of the youngest think to turn him over to the nearby Confederate soldiers, but the two older girls, Edwina (Kirsten Dunst), their meek and dutiful instructor, isolated and alone, like a bird in a gilded cage, perhaps seeing a man for the first time in her life, and an overly coquettish teenager Alicia (Elle Fanning), not to mention Miss Martha herself, seem smitten by having a male presence, deciding to mend his wounds while nursing him back to health, scrubbing his body herself while declaring his room “off-limits” to the six girls residing there.  But this doesn’t stop each one from secretly paying the corporal a visit, where he delights in charming each and every one.  While Miss Martha is all convention and formality, representative of the manners practiced by the overly protected Southern belles, she treats the prisoner with all due respect, even offering him wine and pleasant company after dinner, failing to mention his presence to the passing soldiers that look in on them from time to time, as they themselves are in need of protection during wartime, asking instead if one of them might share some ammunition for a pistol she keeps handy.  What follows is a comic choreography of repressed sexual curiosity, rotating between the three oldest women, but sometimes the youngest as well, with each one thinking he is paying them the most attention.  This rivalry, however, leads to bickering and backstabbing, with each apparently figuring to win the handsome prince for themselves.  Once his health improves, however, Miss Martha sets a deadline, forcing him to make his own way, letting him go with no designs of turning him in.  Many of the girls protest, as does McBurney himself, having little interest in the war, as he is a deserter from the ranks, preferring to make himself useful on the premises, but to Miss Martha that option is unthinkable.  We soon discover why, as instead of leaving, he is discovered in the bedroom of the hormonally challenged Alicia, found by Edwina, who he professed his love for, and is shell-shocked by what she sees.  With both lovebirds professing their innocence, McBurney confronts a startled Edwina at the top of the stairs, pushing him away, where he goes toppling down the stairs, seriously re-injuring his leg.  In the pandemonium that follows, emotions erupt, as formality is thrown out the window, actually turning momentarily into exaggerated camp while McBurney loses his leg, though without the cringe-inducing graphic detail of the original.  When he realizes what’s happened, he’s outraged, growing more and more belligerent, blaming Miss Martha for jealously maiming him because he picked another girl, finding the gun, and literally terrorizing the girls, all except Edwina who walks into his bedroom, locks the door, and crawls into bed with him.  Nonetheless, he’s made it clear why no men are allowed on the premises, as he offsets the balance of nature, like a fox in a chicken coop, ultimately showing no respect whatsoever, grabbing all the alcohol he can drink until he passes out, allowing the girls to quickly devise a plan to get rid of the wolf, which works perfectly, exactly as it does in the original.  Incredulously, these women lack for nothing, as they are always dressed in their Sunday best, immaculately clean, and have all the food and provisions they need, and then some, living luxuriously in a time of deprivation and war, while others in the South are on the verge of starvation.  It’s a fantasy version of the hard times that do exist, like taking a left turn into a parallel universe, with Coppola remaining immune to the historical realities of the times. While she does enter into the giddy mindsets of the girls, exposing their unique group dynamic, characterized by privileged, overly sheltered lives and extreme social isolation, her portraiture leaves out all the power and melodramatic drama at the heart of the original.