Here’s an obvious understatement: Bob Dylan is a rare breed.
With celebrity as well-deserved as it is self-created — and self-effaced — he keeps on truckin’ like a downbeat and/or beat down character out of one of his dusty Americana rhapsodies, a born, burnt and reborn phoenix from the ashes of an out of tune six-string. He survived the scrutiny of “plugging in” in 1965, only to forge even more fantastic music that would raise his legend above the pop pantheon that your typical, laconic hipster musician rarely escapes with more than a sophomore slump to his name. Not that at this point Dylan needs that kind of credibility, but the fact that he can weather the burns of narrow-minded film critics with regard to Masked and Anonymous only to flourish as a beloved legend — simultaneously known and unknown — is practically beyond human, particularly in our culture of petty publicity attempts and gossipy bad press.
Masked and Anonymous, pseudonymously co-written by Dylan and Seinfeld-cum-Curb Your Enthusiasm vet Larry Charles, is one of those experiences that separates the men from the boys in terms of watching a film, and nowhere else is this better seen than in the mainstream press’s square-John response to a film that is, while flawed, certainly one of the more daring films to see a U.S. release last year. And just as Dylan was shunned by so-called supporters for going electric before the folk thing tin-panned out, he will always be railed for this seeming vanity project, though no less loved. (What art isn’t a vanity project, anyway? Do that many artists really see themselves as martyrs, instead of the imperfect beings they suffer so to portray? Come on. Having such humanism and humor is one of Dylan’s greater claims to fame.)
Masked and Anonymous does not defy direction, as some might tell you, though it might deliberately defy cohesion. To get the idea, I’ll leave you to take your pick of unthinking reviews with plagiarized summaries of the story. Nevertheless, one thing is for certain: Dylan is Jack Fate, a stone-faced troubador of few words and even less backstory, that same beat lead who has the tendency to appear in his enshrined music.
Ambiguity is legal in music and a mortal sin in cinema. Or so they say. Setting it to a good backbeat is okay; projecting it clear in front of your eyes makes it inaccessible. Or so they say. And they wonder why sometimes they feel Dylan is laughing at them?
The number of interpretations — dismissals, mostly — of Masked and Anonymous’s story probably relate to the film’s lack of formal exposition. It doesn’t explain itself the way you’d expect, however neither does good poetry. And Dylan is a poet, isn’t he? So we’re told. So, Masked and Anonymous is not too different than many a venerated Dylan song. Consequently, its metaphor is misread as incoherence and its artistic experimentation is mistaken for ineptitude. Like a lot of poetry.
Not to say that there is no bad poetry. That would sure be a lie.
Larry Charles, who directed the film, elsewhere suggests that he wanted it to be like a Bob Dylan song, and it very much is, though a notable contrast is that Dylan’s music mostly changed how people listened by revamping older, more traditional styles — folk, blues, anything associated with Woody Guthrie, etc. Masked and Anonymous, on the other hand, challenges how we watch a film not by adopting a traditional cinematic narrative or drama but by challenging expectations with oblique Dylanspeak.
I’ll spare you snarky song references and the over-quoting of lines that you’ll see in other reviews. In print, they are little more than out of context exchanges like the following between Jeff Bridges’ journalist, the ironically named Tom Friend, and his OCD Catholic girlfriend, Pagan (ah ha) Lace, played by ever-adorable Penelope Cruz:
Tom Friend: “It’s an overcrowded world. It’s hard to get to the top. There’s a long line at the elevator.”
Pagan Lace: “It’s okay. We’ll take the stairs.”
What is that? A joke? Deep, probing commentary? Cool affect for effect? The autumnal masturbation of a legend? Payback for what you said about Renaldo and Clara? Not knowing Dylan as we don’t, it could be all and none. Later on, Fate tells us in voiceover, “Sometimes it’s not enough to know the meaning of things. Sometimes you have to know what things don’t mean, as well.” This is as much a commentary on Dylan’s mottled persona as it is a final cue for viewers to do some thinking about the film. Coming from the Man himself, and in a voiceover, it’s a move straight out of the French New Wave. I wonder if those in the Self-Important Critics Club were ever as annoyed by the similarly vague musings in Godard’s monotone voiceover in Band Outsiders.
So what does or doesn’t it not mean? Essentially, a summation of simple Beat Buddhism: everything and nothing. One of the most brilliant jokes in this film, a joke aimed mostly at critics, is that the story’s star, writer and focal point doesn’t say a whole hell of a lot. In fact, the lion’s share of his dialogue is delivered through voiceover or song. Living up to Dylan’s greatest ambiguities, Jack Fate’s Ronald Colman-mustache lips are sealed whilst the lunatics around him rant and rave as if they’re Jack Fate experts. But Fate himself sits tight. He refuses to give anything away.
Ultimately, it’s understandable why the film chafed so many critics. This is no Citizen Kane, no flamboyant tribute to journalism’s righteous truth quest about the epitome of journalism moguls. Masked and Anonymous’s villain is a journalist, an ornery critic who is murdered by Fate’s younger counterpart with a guitar that once belonged to Blind Lemon Jefferson. If you can’t figure out that metaphor, go to the back of the class and re-watch Don’t Look Back.
And while you’re back there, try out some poetry analysis:
We’re not dealing with morons here. We’re not hearing the rambling of a toddler but the words of a rambling man. We’re not dealing with an inexperienced undergrad weaned on video store rentals but a director who might be too big for his prime-time TV britches.
What we have is not a failure to communicate but a failure to listen and attempt to understand. Jack Fate is Bob Dylan, you, me, freedom, an imprisoned individual set free only to work for the System. But he is also none of that, for his father is Manuel Noriega, Moammar Khadafi and Saddam Hussein. Saddam Hussein is one of the fathers of our confusion, a confusion that is not unlike the Benzedrine revelations made by Giovanni Ribisi’s revolutionary soldier (in the back of the bus, natch) about how the current revolution and counter-revolution are funded to a degree by the government — which government in which country is uncertain, and no one can remember why anyhow. Mickey Rourke’s despot is both a Latin dictator and a questionable “liberator” a la George W. Bush. And he is neither, though he is just as scary and just as experienced in the fine art of coup d’etat.
There’s more, in the archetypal sense and in the gratuitous cameo sense. As for the more important few: John Goodman’s Uncle Sweetheart is as much concert promoter as he is televangelist and Son of God setting a would-be Messianic Jew free to do his bidding. Jessica Lange’s Nina Veronica is around for more than just middle-aged sex appeal, she’s a talent agent, the Industry’s evil step-matriarch, a Mary in a tight dress who’s really running the show for the greedy white men, the yang pressure to the yin of the all-African American mob-revolutionary-government-whatsit breathing down Sweetheart’s sweaty neck from the start. Angela Bassett’s unnamed mistress is Mary Magdelene — and that pretty much covers it. Ed Harris appears as a ghost minstrel in blackface — more self-deprecation from bluesman Dylan (via Buñuel). And Luke Wilson’s Bobby Cupid is the aforementioned younger follower of Fate, a baby Robert Zimmerman already jaded by the machination of people and, more specifically, the bizarre systems of their self-destruction.
It’s all beautiful nonsense on the surface, and Hollywood — comprised of the moviemakers and the moviewatchers — don’t truck with that. It’s also timely truth — for this truly is a sad and beautiful world — and all the timeless emotional stuffs that comprise the world of Dylan, which, in the end, is our American world, the press kits from which, in the end, claim Masked and Anonymous to be a reference to the screenwriters’ noms de plume, though it is perhaps more an indication of a story and its masked meanings, and the open invitation to uncover them.
