Joshua Tree, 1951: A Portrait of James Dean

JOSHUA TREE 1951 is brilliant. It touched my heart so deeply, there were tears running down my cheeks as it concluded. Because of the film, I FELT James Dean. I FELT the greatness of his talent and I felt the pain of his choices. Not many films can do this. Director Matthew Mishory captures the terrible conflict between what an artist must do for his art and what he gives up - the risks he must take, the life he gives up in order to progress, to honor, to grow his art - and the artist's personal life - love, relationships, family, stability. With the specter of Fate hanging heavily over the film like the thick clouds of the Joshua Tree desert hanging over the characters, Mishory explores the concept of "destiny". Are the artist's choices inevitable?

Good movies entertain. Great movies linger in the viewer's mind long after the end credits roll. Joshua Tree, 1951: A Portrait of James Dean does exactly that. It's been days since I viewed this amazing film at the Seattle International Film Festival and I can't get it out of my mind.

To appreciate this film one must cast aside all preconceived notions of who the so-called hyper-cool stud James Dean was - or wasn't. One must surrender to the film's almost dream-like, nonlinear storyline. One also must also not be homophobic to enjoy this unique gem of a film.

Joshua Tree, 1951 is simply beautiful, from the surprising opening scene to the end. James Preston, playing James Dean, gives a raw portrayal of the price Dean paid to become a star. Preston skillfully plays Dean as he was before the world knew him: fresh off the farm, seething with ambition, hungry for knowledge. Dan Glenn masterfully plays The Roommate (rumored to be real-life former Dean roommate Bill Bast), painting a remarkably beautiful portrait of love that could never be in the early 1950s. The audience sympathizes The Roommate as the one who paid the life-long price for loving Dean. Ed Singletery, playing Roger, is a wonderful metaphor for the Hollywood "machine," and Dalilah Rain, playing Violet, is a delight to watch.

The cinematography is sure to attract the attention of award ceremonies and will be studied in film schools for years to come.

Go see this film!

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.

I was born in April of 1956. The real James Dean hadn't been dead for a year yet and so I hadn't seen his movies or his images until my teen years. The real James Dean was OK looking, but James Preston's James Dean is the stuff of dreams and fantasies that stay in your head longer. The softer character portrayal and erotic sensual man on man scenes are nothing shameful to watch and you see the beauty of both the inside of Dean's (and Preston's) spirit and what made Jimmy as himself. The flow of this movie stayed in it's artistic, sensuous style and to me, that was the beauty of it. It was like getting an intimate glimpse into someone's life you didn't know much of before, but now you feel privileged for the knowledge of it if that makes sense. All the actors did a good job, but it was the relationship between Dean and his roommate that I wanted to see and wasn't disappointed. I can watch this film over and over because of it's sensitive, alluring presentation presented so nicely by James Preston.

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.