S&W: 6 Dylans, How Many Facts?

What an avant-garde film that was. Looks like a lot of people didn’t understand it very well until some of it was explained by Professor Heller. I was able to follow it all right since I knew what to expect beforehand, and I’m roughly familiar with Bob Dylan’s life and music. Even so, the Richard Gere material was completely lost on me (it turned out to be a story formulated from Dylan’s song lyrics and not biographical), and it was kind of upsetting to learn from Prof. Heller at the end that there was a lot of fiction in the film.

I think that’s my big problem with biopics – I’m never sure what to believe. Autobiographies are my favorite genre of books. I like to think I can trust them. But when people’s lives are put on the screen, filmmakers take liberties with the facts (which makes it more watchable), and in the end I’m never sure what really happened to the subject. I guess the bottom line is that when I watch a biography film, my purpose is to become more knowledgeable about the person, but I end up unable to determine the facts from the fiction and am basically no better off for having seen the film. I just realized something: I only like biography films of people whose lives I initially had no interest in learning more about. That’s when the fiction doesn’t bother me.

But I shouldn’t be so harsh with I’m Not There. I don’t think you can really call this a biopic in the first place. The purpose didn’t appear to be outlining the events of Dylan’s life so much as it was an illustration of his “many lives.” It was to get inside Dylan’s mind, not to re-enact what he did.

~ by theabsconder on November 17, 2008.