Joshua Tree, 1951: A Portrait of James Dean

I saw the film last night at the Outfest Film Festival in Los Angeles. This is a visually beautiful new film about James Dean, the iconic actor who is still very revered and loved and whose film legacy still continues strong 57 years after his death. This is not the typical biopic though, it gets into details about his life that were not well known until recently. James Preston is excellent playing James Dean expressing his ambition and vulnerability, willing to play the game in Hollywood to get a chance and still keeping the powers that be from ruling or controlling him. He was a rebel in the sense that he wanted to be true to himself and his talent above all else and lived and experienced a great deal and achieved his dream by the age of 24 when he died. The film takes place in the few years before his acting led to the three films he would do eventually that would propel his star and fame and became his legacy. He's in the process here of becoming a real actor and starting to understand who he wants to be as a man. In 1951 Dean was only 20 and he was trying to figure himself out and those around him and to understand what's important to him. Much of the film seems like almost dream like sequences or partial scene memories filmed in beautiful black and white striking images, the cinematography is top notch! I've read biographies on Dean's life and the movie is accurate from the accounts I've read. The director/writer Matthew Mishory, did a very good job making a film about his subject in a way that's unique and hasn't been done in the same way before. The supporting cast is very good as well. I recommend seeing it and I'm looking forward to seeing it again!

If you've never seen East of Eden or Rebel Without a Cause or Giant; and if you know and care nothing about James Dean; and if you'd rather look at Abercrombie & Fitch ads than watch a movie; and if you like to daydream that all beautiful men are gay; and if you like gazing at James Preston; and if a line like "It was as if I had seen in black and white my entire life and suddenly I saw in color" (in an excruciatingly solemn movie that switches between black and white and color) sends you into ecstasies of intellectual bliss, then this is the movie for you.

If you HAVE seen the real James Dean in ANY movie, then you cannot for one second accept this milky crap as anything but one very stupid man's wet dream. Matthew Mishory should be slapped silly for wasting fantastic cinematography on this silly, stupid, pretentious movie.

I admit that James Preston is fabulously beautiful, and if this movie hadn't even pretended to be about James Dean, then I could have gazed in drooling stupor at him in every frame. But his transcendent gorgeousness is one reason he makes an absolutely terrible James Dean. Dean looked and acted more like James Franco than like James Preston.

The other reason Preston makes an absolutely terrible James Dean is that he's a smug, self-satisfied, talentless wimp, gorgeous on the outside with nothing but marshmallows inside. Dean was raw, vulnerable, fascinating, unstable and dangerous as a lit firecracker, not at all the cool, smug, calculating opportunist Mishory makes him here because it's all Preston's acting ability allows.

The only wise move Mishory made was not letting Preston try to recreate even one second of any performance Dean ever gave. The only glimpse of Dean "acting" we see is him jumping over a table in acting class.

The James Dean of this movie is like the real James Dean in only one way: he's short.

From my point of view this rather dreamy film-noir mood piece adds little to our understanding of James Dean as an actor. I followed his career at the time in such magazines as Photoplay and Modern Screen, saw all his movies as soon as they came out, and read the clippings avidly. No ordinary fan at the time believed even the slightest hint that he was gay. Indeed, that whole concept as it is now so glibly thrown about had yet to be taken up by Middle America. He was then defined in part by playing opposite Natalie Wood, Julie Harris, and Elizabeth Taylor. Ditto his penchant for fast cars. If there are in fact scenes in his three films that can be interpreted today as demonstrative of overtly erotic interaction with the likes of Sal Mineo or Rock Hudson, they prove very little about the actor himself.

On the other hand, this film is a compelling cinematic portrait constructed around a half-dozen major biographical studies that provide independent evidence of Dean's early career apart from those films. That limited portrait is what the film is about, not all the other loose ends of his professional career. It is a picture made up of second and third-hand stuff as seen through the virtual lens of a Kodak Brownie camera (I had one of those myself at the time). But just because the portrait is presented in a heavily shaded black- and- white panorama of the Mojave Desert purportedly in 1951 is no reason to regard it as historically superior to the more linear and Technicolor alternative that has yet to be filmed.

James Dean deserves a film version of his life that explores more fully his childhood, his teens, his years in New York, his sexuality (admit it, folks, he was gay), his pixie-like sense of humor, his first breakthrough into major films, and the effect he had on both co- workers and contemporary fans. This present film is like a slowly constructed line drawing, moving snail-like across the page.

Had this movie been about a fictional Hollywood actor, I think I would have had a better opinion of it. I have no special insight into or biographical knowledge of James Dean, but having seen his movies not long after they were made and watched some more recent shows about him on TV, I had a sense of who he was. He always seemed to me an attractive, erotic, if somewhat difficult to understand, icon of the 1950's. I grew up in the 50's and 60's, and his rebelliousness struck a chord in me. I always felt an ill-defined empathy for what was driving his behavior.

There were occasions when the actor in this movie managed to evoke a feel for Dean, but they were just momentary, static poses. There was really very little about either his appearance or behavior that helped me to connect to the James Dean I think I knew.

In general, when watching a good movie I expect to be drawn into it and to forget that I am watching actors acting. It's a sort of voyeurism. In this movie, I never forgot that I was watching actors act, reading lines written for them by someone else about someone they neither knew particularly well nor cared very very much about.

Basically I was disappointed. Maybe my expectations were too high, but I never really felt I was watching anything to do with James Dean and the heavy black & white moodiness of the presentation seemed more contrived and ponderous than evocative.

This movie is simply horrendous! From start to finish, I had trouble staying focused on what was going on. The dialog, and the story in general was boring and unbelievable. Add that to the fact that the actors were terrible, and you get a real mess. James Preston, while handsome, was no James Dean, by any stretch of the imagination. His hair is too long, he looks nothing like Dean in the face, and his mannerisms are deplorable. And it is not sexy, if that was the intent. The movie features long lustful looks at naked and half naked men and women, but hasn't one ounce of sensual appeal. A waste of 93 minutes. You've been warned. This movie is not recommended by me.