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| Cate Blanchett, Christian Bale, Heath Ledger, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Marcus Carl Franklin, Richard Gere, Ben Whishaw |
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Anamorphic
widescreen |
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Dolby Digital
5.1 |
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DTS |
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Trailer(s) |
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Featurette(s) |
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Documentary |
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Audio commentary
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Deleted scenes
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Concept art
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Multi-angle
feature |
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Billy the Kid (Richard Gere): People are always talking about freedom. Freedom to live a certain way, without being kicked around. Course the more you live a certain way, the less it feel like freedom. Me, uhm, I can change during the course of a day. I wake and I'm one person, when I go to sleep I know for certain I'm somebody else. I don't know who I am most of the time.
Ruminations on the life and music of Bob Dylan, where six characters embody different aspects of the musician's life and work.
 Given the recent spate of popular biopics on iconic popular musicians like Ray Charles and Johnny Cash, the appearance of a feature film documenting the most mercurial, brilliant and influential musician of the twentieth century is hardly surprising. The good news is that the project appeared not in the reductionist form of these recent successes (the conventions and clichés of which were recently mocked in the hilarious Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story). Instead, the iconoclastic writer-director Toddy Haynes decided to create a film that is actually about the basic impossibility of grasping the core of such a celebrity.
Illustrating Dylan's fundamental unknowability, Haynes famously cast six different actors to play various manifestations of just a few of the many Dylan myths and images, ranging from a black boy (embodying the singer's own fictionalization of a mythic past) to the stunning Cate Blanchett (as the skeletal 'Dylan-gone-electric' teetering on the edge of a complete breakdown). Using both original Dylan music and inspired new performances of tracks both iconic and obscure, Haynes has managed to create a form that pays tribute to the musician while investigating our culture's tendency to mythologize and pin down human figures who are overwhelmed by their own celebrity. The only caveat may be that the film has a tendency to depend on an above-average familiarity with the singer's biography, making large parts of the film all but incomprehensible to those with only a passing interest in His Royal Bobness. |
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Available on DVD as a two-disc set for Region 1.
The anamorphic widescreen
image is framed at an aspect ratio of approx. 2.35:1. The richly textured image, which employs a wide variety of film stocks and source materials, is flawlessly presented in this stunning transfer, which is as close to perfection as one could expect a standard-definition DVD to be.
The Dolby
Digital 5.1 sound mix supports the musical soundtrack ably, making both newly recorded tracks and the vintage Dylan songs sound fresh, clean and sprightly.
 Perhaps appropriately for a film so radically fragmented in nature, the extras spread around this two-disc set are similarly spread out across several areas and categories. The best and by far the most cohesive entry is director Todd Haynes' audio commentary for the film proper, which offers a wealth of information, background and insight into the production and the governing ideas behind it. Talking a mile a minute, Haynes delves into an abundance of thoughts that fuelled his screenplay and its execution, and he is never less than rewarding to listen to.
The other extras are found on the second platter, divided into four areas. The first simply showcases three different trailers for the film, while the second section brings us Franklin and Whishaw's screentests along with a small handful of deleted and extended scenes (unfortunately without any commentary). The third section of this disc is the meatiest, with four featurettes of over twenty minutes on the film's red carpet premiere, on the creation of the musical soundtrack, and a short tribute to Heath Ledger. The longest entry here is the misleadingly-titled 'A Conversaiont with Todd Haynes', which turns out to be a 42-minute assembly of the director responding to interviewers at a wide variety of occasions. The final section is a text-based collection of information on Bob Dylan, including a biography and full discography.
Dan
Hassler-Forest
Reviewed:
May 5, 2008
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