Recueil de poèmes en hommage aux deux auteurs
The Morning: The enigma of Bob Dylan
Good morning. Today, my colleague Alissa Wilkinson writes about the new Bob Dylan film. We’re also covering al-Assad’s secret escape, pharmacy deserts and airplane movies. —David Leonhardt
Bob Dylan Bettmann |
Bob Dylan, revisited
My holiday season has been filled with parties, and as a movie critic, that has meant a lot of conversations about the big upcoming movie. This year there’s a clear winner, at least at the events I’ve been attending. Someone sidles up to me, Negroni or Coke in hand, and asks, sotto voce, Have you seen the Bob Dylan movie? And then the follow-up: So is it any good?
Yes, I have seen “A Complete Unknown,” about Dylan’s early years. And yes, though critical opinion has so far been somewhat divided, I quite liked it, as I mentioned in my recent essay on this year’s big crop of movies set in New York. It looks great and plays slyly with some rocker biopic conventions. Plus, Timothée Chalamet makes a great Dylan, and Edward Norton is fantastic as Pete Seeger.
The movie also prompted me to think more broadly about Bob Dylan onscreen. In fact, I spent the better part of the last two months watching every movie he appears in, and a few in which other people play him. Quality varies widely, and midway through I flirted with regret; there’s a long stretch from the late 1980s to the early 2000s where they’re outright abysmal. (If you want to be reminded of how bad a movie can be, try 2003’s “Masked and Anonymous.”)
But it was fascinating to watch him, and the film industry, evolve. “Dont Look Back,” the documentary by D.A. Pennebaker shot during Dylan’s 1965 concert tour in England, is a bona fide landmark in American cinema, preserved in the Library of Congress. After that documentary, and some others, Dylan tried out acting and directing himself (with mostly unfortunate results). In recent years, filmmakers like Todd Haynes, Martin Scorsese and the Coen brothers have come at Dylan from other directions, all trying to capture a singer who never stays in one shape for very long. (Haynes’s 2007 film “I’m Not There,” for instance, uses six different actors to play versions of the singer, including Cate Blanchett and Christian Bale.)
Throughout these 15 films, I found myself wondering: Why has Dylan proved so fascinating and, at times, elusive to filmmakers — even when the filmmaker is himself? That’s more or less what “A Complete Unknown” is exploring. Its title is a nod to the film’s thesis, one my Dylan binge bore out: He has spent his career purposely making himself unknowable. He appeared out of nowhere, told tall tales and messed with journalists, and radically shifted his musical style just as people were ready to anoint him king of folk music.
He is, in other words, the consummate postmodern celebrity: lauded for authenticity but also seemingly totally unconcerned with it. I’m nowhere near as immersed in Dylanalia as some of my colleagues are, but I think this ability to try on a new identity — something the movie shows him defending — is probably what’s made him endure for so long. With Dylan, you never quite know what you’re getting, and he is in on the trick.
I don’t know if “A Complete Unknown” will ignite interest in Dylan among a new generation who turn out for Chalamet. But I’m certain that if it does, they’ll still have to try to figure him out.
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THE INTERVIEW |
Jonathan Roumie Philip Montgomery for The New York Times |
This week’s subject for The Interview is the actor Jonathan Roumie, who plays Jesus on the enormously successful series “The Chosen.” He talked about the intense offscreen complications that have arisen from his onscreen part.
When I watch videos of you giving [public] talks, you come out to a wave of applause. That sort of attention, combined with getting it for playing Jesus, strikes me as a potentially psychologically and spiritually combustible situation. Does it feel that way?
No. I recognize that none of this is about me. When people react the way they do, and yell out “Jesus!” they’re seeing me as the face of the guy that they’ve had this response to while experiencing the show. Psychologically they know I’m not Jesus, but they want me to be the next best thing. I, of course, cannot go anywhere near that reality.
But you also feel as if you’ve been put here for a reason.
Yes, there’s a sense of mission, but the mission is about Jesus. So I’m playing this character that people, for the most part, already love. They have a relationship with him. Then I come in and I sort of fulfill their idea of who that person is. I’m also one of them, in that I have a relationship. A lot of fans know how I feel about Jesus and God and faith. If I believe in divine destiny, it’s that I was meant to play this character at this time and place in history.
Let me ask a seasonally appropriate question. Do you have feelings about how secular Christmas has become?
It’s hard to sort of see it being hijacked. I remember as a kid seeing these signs around churches: Keep Christ in Christmas. Especially now, any movie that comes out during the season that’s about Christmas, there’s no trace of Jesus in it at all. So it’s unfortunate.
Read more of the interview here.
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