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Hoping to escape the industrial crush of his hometown of Macclesfield, Curtis found solace in the music of David Bowie and the poetry of Wordsworth, both of which informed his work until he committed suicide just as Joy Division was about to make it big. Corbijn, working from the biography written by Curtis' widow, traces the singer's fall to a stifling marriage at a young age and an increasingly severe case of epilepsy.
Control will perhaps best be remembered for Corbijn's black-and-white cinematography, which captures both the ashen depression that envelops Macclesfield and the visceral atmosphere of early Joy Division concerts in pubs and halls. That's a shame, because it is Corbijn's portrayal of Curtis' romantic and physical frustrations -- made more tender by the performance by Samantha Morton as Curtis' wife -- that gives Control its heart and its uniqueness of vision. Corbijn also deserves credit for an inspired bit of casting the lead for Curtis; Sam Riley was at the time a struggling musician who decided to return to acting more as an act of desperation.
Haynes has certainly been getting more than his share of praise for the visual and aural feel of I'm Not There. Like Corbijn, Haynes has more than a passing affinity for the grainy, cinema-verite cinematography style that marked D.A. Pennebaker's 1967 groundbreaking Dylan concert-tour documentary, Don't Look Back. But like the number of Dylan personas, Haynes doesn't stop there. As a filmmaker who is used to capturing a certain era -- the glam rock of the early '70s in Velvet Goldmine, the Edward Hopper colors of the '50s in Far from Heaven -- Haynes outdoes himself here by employing every technique in the book to keep the atmosphere matching the changing personas of Bob Dylan. It's as if Haynes had his own personal library of period film stock, so saturated are the colors in one scene and so washed-out in another. It allows him to check every pop-cultural reference he wishes -- and he wishes a lot -- to properly place Dylan in his time and place.
In between, we have brilliant performances by almost all of the "Dylans," most notably Cate Blanchett as the most disillusioned of the Dylans, though my personal favorite is Heath Ledger as the actor/lover Dylan, invoking the frustrated lover of Brokeback Mountain.
That Haynes may have gone overboard -- did we really need Richard Gere to reference Dylan's performance in Sam Peckinpah's Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid? -- shouldn't detract from the notion that Haynes has gone where no filmmaker has gone before in taking on a rock icon. Though no one's saying Haynes should have made I'm Not There using crib notes from Ray, they are wondering if he went too far. Better that, though, than not enough, leaving Dylan and his music almost as mysterious now than before the 2 hours and 15 minutes of pure odyssey.
Or, as Temple puts it, "I think it's good to see things in different ways. It's nice to see things you're used to being used to tell a certain idea used in another way."
He was also the correct answer, D, the owner of the comment that opens the article. But he speaks for everyone, really, who made 2007 hit all the right notes.
(I'm Not There is currently playing at the Ballantyne Village Theatre. Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten begins this Friday, also at the BVT. Control opens at the Manor Theatre this Friday. No local date has been set for Kurt Cobain: About a Son.)
PODCASTS: Download Simmons' interview with Julien Temple at http://blogs.creativeloafing.com/podcasts/2007/11/12/julien-temple-joe-strummer-the-future-is-unwritten-director/. Download Simmons' interview with AJ Schnack at http://blogs.creativeloafing.com/podcasts/2007/11/16/aj-schnack-director-of-latest-kurt-cobain-biopic/.