A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Saturday, March 29, 2025

A Complete Unknown (James Mangold, 2024)

Timothée Chalamet in A Complete Unknown
Cast: Timothée Chalamet, Edward Norton, Elle Fanning, Monica Barbaro, Dan Vogler, Eriko Hatsune, Scoot McNairy, Boyd Holbrook, Will Harrison, Norbert Leo Butz, David Alan Basche. Screenplay: James Mangold, Jay Cocks, based on a book by Elijah Wald. Cinematography: Phedon Papamichael. Production design: François Audouy. Film editing: Andrew Buckland, Scott Morris. 

Timothée Chalamet's fine, inward portrayal of Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown put me in mind of T.S. Eliot's proclamation that poetry "is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality." Eliot went on to add, "only those who have personality and emotions know what it is to want to escape from those things." Chalamet's Dylan is so elusive that others who encounter him are able to find what they want in him. The dying Woody Guthrie (Scott McNairy) finds in him a kind of afterlife or reincarnation. Pete Seeger (Edward Norton) sees Dylan as the future of his kind of modern folk music. Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro) learns from him that her music needs more bite and bitterness. Elle Fanning's Sylvie Russo (based on Suze Rotolo) discovers an opportunity to nurture, to find a direction in life for a lost lamb. Johnny Cash (Boyd Holbrook) embraces him as a fellow outlaw, someone to "track mud on the carpet." The music business types, of course, see a halo of dollar bills around him. And the film ends with the folkies at Newport denouncing him as Judas. It's to Chalamet's credit that he can play the role so that Dylan looks like a mirror image, a mentor, a companion, a project, or a traitor at any turn. Still, A Complete Unknown is such a conventional biopic that it has to be compared unfavorably to Todd Haynes's more unconventional approach to Dylan, I'm Not There (2007), which employed six very different actors to suggest his multifaceted nature. For in the end, it's the music that matters, not the man. 


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