Masked and Anonymous
I heard a comment on the lounge with which I must disagree. Someone has dismissed Masked and Anonymous as a failure. I want to stand up and say that I do not think it is a failure. I think Masked and Anonymous is a wonderful movie, a very succesful experiment in what a movie can do. It is innovative and creative and opens up a world of enigmas and poetry. I bought it for my girlfriend's birthday, and we have since watched it five times. After I saw it in the theatre two years ago, I liked it a lot, but knew I would have to see it many more times before I understood what everything was about.
Now that I have seen it many times and understand it better, I will say this. Masked and Anonymous tells a cinematic story in a very different way from typical movies. If you choose not to accept it, you are just choosing to be closeminded to the expansion of the medium of film into further possibilities. The cinematography and art direction are very specifically orchestrated and very effective even if you don't understand it. When I first saw the film, I noticed that I was constantly confused as to whether I was in modern America, an alternate America, or a fictional country. Now I can see that this confusion was intentionally brought into the movie through the third-world journalism colors of the film, and the third-worldish locations present in America. As cleverly as Usual Suspects or The Sixth Sense plays with narrative information, Masked and Anonymous plays with all levels of information (visual, historical, musical, allusional) to create a rich world for an intricate world of relationships to parade about.
The entire story is delightful to watch because once you get what it's really about, you don't worry about the things you normally have on your mind with other films. It's about a benefit concert. Will the show go on? Will it be shut down? Cancelled? Banned? When you understand what the film is actually saying, you realize it makes no difference at all if the show goes on or not. You don't get caught up in plot and character development like you do in other films. But that doesn't mean there's nothing interesting to follow. There are many interesting relationships between all the people of the movie. But the characters move along like in a Bob Dylan song. When the one-eyed midget shouts the word "Now!", that's all there is to think about. You can consider what it all means, but it doesn't really matter who the midget meets for dinner that night and what they're gonna talk about.
The acting is great. I love Giovanni Ribisi's cameo. John Goodman and Jeff Bridges are always fun to watch. And their parts are really interesting, so even after many viewings, I wanna watch it again and see what they're really all about.
The movie doesn't so much have a plot as motifs. There is some plot, but the motifs are stronger and the important parts. When you watch the movie you have to watch in a totally different way than other movies.
I feel like I get tossed around in a sea of ideas by the language and warped around reality and imagination in the visual images of the film. It's not the climax and release structure of other films.
It's the kind of movie that feels good to quote, like a good Bob Dylan lyric.
1 Comments:
For the most part, I agree with Finnagain. Masked and Anonymous is a fascinating artistic work, equal parts strange and beautiful.
What it isn't is a film in the traditional sense, and that is what has drawn so much criticism. It doesn't have much of a story arc, the acting is sometimes terrible, the direction is mystifying and there's never really a sense that Masked and Anonymous is even quite sure of what it's all about. But all that misses the point. It's certainly not going to please folks who aren't already Dylan fans.
Masked and Anonymous is more of a song than a film, which is puzzling, but it really has all the elements of great Dylan songs. The characters are allegorical hyperbole, all shoved together in a world straining at the seams with absurdity. The strange futuristic revolutionary world is a character itself, presenting not an opposite America but a slightly different one that grew perhaps from just few people taking a different fork in the road of the 1960s. Dylan himself could have been part of a series of different choices from which the world of Masked and Anonymous emerged.
The characters are drawn accurately and cynically from archtypes of American culture. Greed is an undercurrent in many of the strung-out, end-of-the-line losers. A deep mysticism inhabits others. And the Dylan character, Jack Fate, is as inscrutable as his own legend. It's Dylan's hyperbolic take on his own public persona.
When it comes down to it, Masked and Anonymous is groundbreaking cinema, a unique thought-provoking song-movie combination, filled with turns and twists and wonderful imagination.
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