Could we have known thirty years ago - around the time he left the Disney of Oliver & Company behind to fashion 1995's delicate, pulsing indie fable Heavy - that James Mangold would someday become such a bedrock of Dad Cinema? After the second-gear exhilaration of 2019's Le Mans '66, Mangold returns to the territory of 2005's Walk the Line with his latest A Complete Unknown, which recreates Bob Dylan's formative years on the US folk scene. This milieu has been picked over many times before, most recently by the Coens' Inside Llewyn Davis, which defined Dylan by his absence (and who he wasn't). Here, the tousle-haired troubadour is set front-and-centre in an Oscar shot for Little Timmy Caramel, a process that involves the usual compression of timelines, rewriting of history and smoothing over of jagged life experience; what was once fringe activity gets made more palatable for the mass audience in a series of scenes you will have seen (and perhaps enjoyed) a dozen or more times over. You know the score: characters who introduce themselves by their full name ("I'm Bobby Neuwirth", "I'm Al Kooper") so as to impart their import to connoisseurs, the first notes of masterpieces scratched out on guitars (the musical biopic's Eureka moments), a closing bout of onscreen text to remind us This Is History. Mangold's film hedges its bets further by framing Dylan as one among many folkies who might yet suffer the indignity of their own Hollywood biopic, from oldtimers Pete Seeger (Edward Norton) and Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy) to upstarts like Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro). Practically the one surprise is that it's altogether more of a group shot than the expected portrait of an artist as a young man, repackaging multiple greatest hits compilations for the price of one ticket; even Johnny Cash recurs, played here by Boyd Holbrook as a wayward musical lodestar. Yet as a damning social-media post by Merrill Markoe has detailed, A Complete Unknown - directed by a man, written by two, and produced by five - is more dismissive of its women than a film on the Sixties folk scene needs to be, and generally proves content merely to replay familiar tunes, to stir dusty memories of boomer youth.
It should be noted that Mangold, who apprenticed at a time the studios were still teaching their directors craft, is better than most at smoothing over. From an early stage, we feel we are in safe hands; this is presumably why Fox (or what remains of Fox after the Disney buyout) brought the film's release date forwards so as to compete for this year's awards. As a production, A Complete Unknown is broadly handsome: though a touch more cramped than Walk the Line - even studio budgets aren't what they used to be pre-2008 - that's not unhelpful for a drama that largely unfolds around a sunny (Australian-built) replica of Greenwich Village, and these sets do much to preserve the chilled atmos of a less cluttered era, wherein a provincial boy might well have had the time and space to rethink and reinvent himself as the voice of a generation. (The movie is meticulous in its recreation of how white people of a certain age remember the Sixties: that may be enough to ensure it's a hit.) These rooms are populated by performers who are also likely fans, and so feel especially compelled to channel the look and spirit of those they're impersonating; this extends to doing their own singing and playing their own instruments, as Walk the Line previously insisted. The pick of the pack is Norton's Seeger, a genuine character, and the one person on screen who seems any fun to be around, dorky as he is. The limitation is that much of the rest never gets past the level of surface impersonation: A Complete Unknown largely resembles some folk-themed holiday special of Stars in Their Eyes with unusually detailed linking segments. It's terribly bland for a Dylan movie - ploddingly prosaic, where Todd Haynes's I'm Not There was chancy and imaginative - and Chalamet-as-Dylan, nursing his cigarettes with maximum preciousness and never once appearing to age, at all points proves a far less compelling focus than the refusenik star of Don't Look Back, observed with jagged edges very prominently intact. Truth is almost always more interesting than these sorts of fictions.
A Complete Unknown opens in cinemas nationwide from Friday.
No comments:
Post a Comment