Masked and Anonymous

This movie will mean little to you if you aren't my age (late fifties). That's because you actually had to be there when Bob Dylan was the most powerful man in the west, exchanging leadership with the merged Lennon and McCartney. Together they led us like no one had or has since in terms of immediacy.

I'm talking about the period between his protest singing and his collapse into fundamentalism. From "Tambourine Man," to "Twist of Fate," with the John Wesley Harding period being his most profound. His method was simple, to let himself go and trust what he saw on the edges of his vision. It wasn't that he engineered himself to be at the front of us. Instead he advertised a small bit of conceptual thinking for the pop mind and we grew into it, in his direction almost as if by accident.

The point is that he was important, but never knew why. His insights and art were far more intelligent than he was. And when he fell into the fundamentalist stupor it probably seemed like a reinvention following all the others.

This business of not knowing is crucial to whether you should actually listen to him when he tries to say something.

So go and watch "Renaldo and Clara" which he co-wrote with one of our two greatest living playwrights. It has a grand shape, multiple people playing the same character; multiple characters played by the same person. Scintillating realities, shifting fundamentals. That's the Sam Shepard part. The Dylan part is so juvenile, so obtuse, so plain artless it carries its own message.

And that's what we have here too. Except this time, the grand shape is by a cartoon writer instead of a master playwright. So we start with vapid notions of profundity. This writer believes that Dylan is still the man most thought he was 25 years ago. Even that was wrong: he simply saw rather than understood even then.

Well, so we have this vast stroke of fate, Jake Fate (Twist of Fate, see?), this notion of the son of a broken God (John Wesley Harding, get it? nudge, nudge) and along the way scads of characters drawn to illustrate the various ways mankind has broken itself.

The good news is that many of these are played by first rate actors. Sam Shephard's wife has the role of "presenter." But they are drawn so cartoonishly they miss any target they could have hit. They are not cinematic. This guy has no cinematic skills. They are not Dylanesque. Dylan has a very specific and consistent imagination that is more "Hitchhiker's Guide" than "Seinfeld" and "The Tick."

We could have gotten an ensemble piece where talented actors synthesized their impressions of Dylan. Now that would have been cool, but they are kept separate.

So what we end up with is a lost soul who once was king, playing a lost soul who once was king, tries to recover — thinks he succeeds, fails miserably in front of our eyes and doesn't know it.

Ted's Evaluation -- 1 of 3: You can find something better to do with this part of your life.

What could go wrong with a movie that features Bob Dylan playing some fun tunes, leading actors John Goodman, Jessica Lange, Luke Wilson, Jeff Bridges and Penelope Cruz, and bit parts by Christian Slater, Ed Harris, Angela Basset, Mickey Rourke and Val Kilmer? Well, let's start with a script penned by Bob Dylan that is easily as ineffable as, say, Subterranean Homesick Blues. If you know why the man in the coonskin cap wants eleven dollar bills (and you only got ten) then maybe you understood this movie. The rest of us struggled with mundane dialogue, disjointed vignettes, thinly veiled allusions to Dylan's life, some sort of statement on revolution, and perhaps an admission by Dylan himself that even he doesn't have a clue as to what most of his songs mean. Maybe if I saw this film another 2-3 times I would unravel the deeper meaning, peel back the layers of symbolism, and better grasp the metaphors that give deeper significance to the movie. On the other hand, it's been 35 years and I still don't know why I should hang around an ink well or watch the parking meters.

I wish I could say that I enjoyed this movie. But the fact is, I rarely laughed, certainly didn't cry, and I didn't really care about any of the characters. I could barely follow the plot line. And I didn't understand most of what was lurking under the surface. None of the actors appeared to have clue as to what was going on either. But then, maybe that's what Dylan meant all along . Maybe, but you shouldn't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.

Sure, Masked and Anonymous (or M&A, as I fondly like to call it) is convoluted and pretentious. Sure, it has ridiculously banal dialogue that makes Forrest Gump sound like an intellectual. Sure, there are preposterously-named characters (Jack Fate, Tom Friend, Uncle Sweetheart, et al) and let's face it, no one actually has a coherent conversation throughout the entire proceeding. But it's not predictable - that counts for something in my book, anyway, and it has Bob Dylan (looking more and more like Salvador Dali in every scene - all he needed was the mustache wax), and Jeff Bridges always rocks. Here's the bottom line for me, though: any film that has a bearded, bare-armed and derangedly disheveled Val Kilmer deliver the title phrase (while fondling a bunny rabbit) can't be all bad.

yes, this is a film about cousin bob. this is the authorized bio of captain Dylan...most of the humor, the comedy of it is centered around the archetypes of humanity dying to know or, believing to know this man they want to know. hardcore Dylan fans have come out to say a resounding 'no'. and why not? when was this man ever pegged down? every actor is endowed with great lines and greater motivation, the screenplay is awesome for an actor: there is a deleted scene where goodman tells Wilson about Alexander the great that is, like most scenes, profound but hilarious--it is a tight rope to walk. and in the background of that scene, there is again the vision of the giant rabbit. it's quite possible that the logic of this film confounds more than a few because it is expected to make sense like the sense we have been relying on for centuries... but sense was never really established concretely. the pitfall of this film is to expect something from it, to not realize the little things: Luke Wilson says 'the glass is always empty, so is the place where the money should be.' ribisi's speech on changing sides; goodman says later to Dylan 'i'm on your side' and Dylan counters 'you have to be born on my side, sweetheart', dylans lines about what cows can digest. and this film is chock full of wonderful, little things... mickey roarkes speech after the president dies, the montage of friend grilling fate, they are all hysterical, the whole script is so dead on, you cannot hold back the laughter. this is a tragic comedy if ever there was one. if one were to witness the last of a species, a specimen that had never been seen before, it would appear strange and without a base, a reason; this film is that. every character is carefully written, carefully acted to breathe life into the archetypes they represent and they all want something from fate and they use whatever wiles they have to get it, but fate does nothing but let them choose their fates, respectively. he is the thing they want and cannot have. the thing, that if only they could nail it down, it could be done and buried. but fate says he has a few songs left. the story of his life, right?

There was a time when music mattered, and the people that made that music mattered too. Bob Dylan was one of those people. Dylan has floated in and out of the public eye over the years, but has made somewhat of a return with the release of his 2001 album Love and Theft. He has tried to increase his current comeback, and extend his hand into another form of art, by written and staring in a new film.

Masked and Anonymous is good no matter what your opinion of Bob Dylan may be. For Dylan fans this is a tour de force of film making. Written like a Dylan epic tune, think Desolation Row, Masked stays just out of reach of the explainable. Coupled with great cameos, Val Kilmer is far and away the best of many, Masked delivers. John Goodman and Jeff Bridges hold supply the majority of the nessecary acting with Luke Wilson helping out on occasion. However this is the Wilson of Old School, and a far cry from the Wilson of the Royla Tennebaums. None of that really matters, however, because this film was made for Bob Dylan, and he is the single most important character on screen.

In Jack Fate Dylan has created a chracter that personifies his style. Fate, an aging rock star returning home for a benefit concert, symbolizes what h as become of Dylan's career as a musician. Masked isn't really the story of Bob Dylan's life, no more then any of his songs are, it can be, however, his response to what his life has been like. The story itself lacks a little and the characters are never fully defined, but like the supporting acting none of that matters. The important part of Masked and Anonymous, and the only reason it was ever made, is Bob Dylan. Taken that way, Masked and Anonymous is a truly excellent, and original, piece of film.