You would have to be a stone Bob Dylan fan to find Masked And Anonymous worthwhile. Let me say this right up front: I am a stone Dylan fan. Even I found it difficult to sit through this mouldy exercise in evasion and bloat.
Playing a musician with the Dylanesque name of Jack Fate, Dylan is the centerpiece of this film. He co-wrote it with director Larry Charles (Seinfeld, Mad About You), who, clearly, is another stone Dylan fan. There is no other explanation for the self-indulgence that marks this effort.
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Unfortunately, the end result is a vanity project gone terribly wrong. It is a kind of extended music video or a bunch of Dylan songs strung together with a kind of plot and dialogue. Unsurprisingly, the only parts of the film that really work are the sequences in which Dylan plays live.
The storyline (such as it is) hinges on Fate's adventures in-between prison sentences. Sprung from jail by a sleazy promoter, he is supposed to play for a benefit concert that never materialises. The film ends when he is sent back to prison. That's about it.
In-between Fate's prison stints, there is a whole lot of talking though nothing much gets said, and if that sounds like a line from a Dylan song, so it should. Fate spouts a sermon's worth of laconic one-liners and enigmatic utterances.
Of course, Dylan made a career out of never replying directly to a question. That way, he stays open to interpretation and can come off sounding gnomic and wise beyond reach.
While Dylan the songwriter has worked this approach over the decades - especially on record, in the novel Tarantula and the film Reynaldo And Clara - we are living in changed times. Today, 'open to interpretation' seems like a cop-out or laziness. It is dissatisfying, too open-ended in a world without closure.
Either that, or I have changed, and no longer have the stomach for gobbledygook.
I mean, in my early teens the line "I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now" from the song My back pages seemed original and profound. When Jack Fate says, "I was always just a singer, maybe not much more than that," it is a sad epitaph for a disused icon and the generation he once gave voice to.
Jeff Bridges as a hack reporter and John Goodman as Uncle Sweetheart, the man who springs Fate from prison, reprise their roles in The Big Lebowski. They are excellent, workmanlike actors.
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Set in a fictional country that looks like Los Angeles become a Banana Republic, Masked And Anonymous was fun for a while as I identified each Dylan reference and soaked up the music. There were odd Dylan covers, including what sounded to me like a Japanese version of My back pages.
So the question is: if in the end all the film has to offer is music, why not buy the soundtrack and leave the movie alone? Good question. And as for an answer, I'll leave it to Jack Fate: "I guess."
