Knock, Knock, Knockin'

Many people who like I'm Not There didn't care for the Richard Gere part. We liked it fine - a little underwritten, but clearly part of the mythos. But we couldn't quite get the Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid thing. So we set out to watch it.

We'd originally seen it when it first came out, and it looked a little bit different in the context of the 70's. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Sergio Leone and Clint Eastwood were making Western movie revisionist history. Peckinpah fit right in. It is an iconoclastic, slightly surrealistic and beautiful film.

Looking at it today, it seems much stranger. The dynamic of wily old actor James Coburn as Pat Garrett v. goofball folksinger Kris Kristofferson as Billy the Kid is amusing (note that a more dignified Kristofferson narrates I'm Not There). The old Western character actors (Jack Elam, Chill Wills, Slim Pickens, etc) stand out more than they did at the time, now that they are icons rather than actors who just didn't get many parts anymore.

But I'd really like to concentrate on Dylan's part. I think he kind of hijacked the movie. Peckinpah didn't really know who he was, but Dylan played a few songs for him that left him in tears. Eventually, he was able to worm himself into a role, playing Billy's sidekick "Alias". I had remembered him as a ratfaced skulking lickspittle, which isn't quite right. He does come across as a hero-worshiper, and his specialty is knife-throwing, which is not quite manly. But he can stand beside Billy the Kid almost as an outlaw peer.

The soundtrack is remembered for "Knockin' on Heaven's Door", but most of the soundtrack is one song - a song with a simple progression and an indefinite number of verses. Somehow, I feel that Dylan is taking over the movie from Peckinpah, swinging it away from a "straight-forward" meditation on aging, the end of the frontier with the coming of civilization and violence, and towards a more mythic tale with themes that were only vaguely visible through the sunlight's glare and the gunsmoke.

But what do I know? I'm just a Dylan fan. Watch it yourself.