I’M NOT THERE (Todd Haynes, 2007)

I have been all over the map in my responses to Todd Haynes’s movies, admiring some (Safe, Far from Heaven) and not admiring others (Poison, Velvet Goldmine). But I’ve never loved anything by Haynes until now. I’m Not There, his bold, brilliant biography of the American troubadour who claims the greatest American songbook of the twentieth century and after, is a cornucopia of Americana shining in all colors and black and white through the prism of America’s thrilling possibility for self-reinventions, that is to say, Herman Melville’s The Confidence Man. I cannot imagine anyone who is so small of spirit that he or she might be able to resist this heart-piercing canvas in which Woody Guthrie appears as a guitar-toting 14-year-old black child riding the rails during the Great Depression. “This Machine Kills Fascists.” Well, this movie kills fascists!
     Minnesota’s Robert Zimmerman’s gut-renching bluesy harmonica bridges the gaps among his various incarnations as Bob Dylan: protestor, gracious commentator; Jew, Christian; folk, rock; acoustic, electric. I never took in the full irony until Haynes’s film: “Everybody must get stoned”—and Dylan was stoned, in effect, by audiences that felt betrayed because they couldn’t keep up with him.
     Before Dylan himself monumentally appears, facets of him and influences on him are played by different actors, including, most memorably, Marcus Carl Franklin (Woody is smiling!), Richard Gere (the outlaw Billy the Kid), Heath Ledger, Cate Blanchett. I worried that each of these actors would have his or her own segment. Not to worry. This movie is the kaleidoscope it needs to be to project formally the fractured nature of America that Dylan still reflects.
     There’s scarcely anything that doesn’t “get” me, including the sign “Direction” pointing home: Nowhere. Here is one of the movies of my dreams.

I CONFESS (Alfred Hitchcock, 1953)

Indoors, a standing bicycle collapses, elucidating the theme: the maintenance of balance; anxiety over its loss. What balance? Of good and evil in us? More so: between competing obligations, desires, the imaginary and the real.
     Based on an updated old play by Paul Anthelme, Alfred Hitchcock’s tremendously moving I Confess begins with documentary shots of Quebec streets and buildings before the camera enters through an open window onto fiction: a corpse, the victim of murder-theft. The culprit, dressed like a priest, flees at night to the sanctuary of the church where he works, prays, confesses his crime to Father Michael Logan, who subsequently cannot disclose the killer’s identity, even to defend himself, even to avoid the death penalty, because he is duty-bound to maintain the sanctity of the Confessional. “We’re free,” Ruth Grandfort tells Logan. A police detective overhears this; but what does it mean? The deceased had been blackmailing Ruth, who is married to a politician, over an imagined adulterous affair between her and Logan. The townsfolk, now a mob, eventually turn on Logan, whose façade of fortitude is a kind of stage performance verging on martyrdom. “The wrong man” feels guilty. Montgomery Clift is brilliant as Father Logan.
     O. E. Hasse beautifully plays the German immigrant whose tender feelings for his hardworking wife prompt his committing murder-theft. Shot by police, expiring, Keller stretches out his hand to Logan, asking for forgiveness—of whom? A fellow human, to unburden his own conscience, or his priest, for absolution?
     When the reason for Logan’s silence is revealed, Ruth is instantly purged of guilt on several grounds, including that Logan’s love for her may have driven him to commit murder. He doesn’t love her, she finally realizes; he loves God. “Let’s go home,” she tells her spouse.