Bob Dylan and the Pope: Mystique and Politique

 

The French thinker Charles Péguy once remarked—I might not have the phrase quite right—that “everything begins in mystique and ends in politique.” In two recent films, both excellent, that remark is put to the test.

Conclave gives us a look inside the political machinations at the highest levels of an institution founded two millennia ago by an individual who enigmatically told a woman at the well, “whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst.”  I’m referring to the Roman Catholic Church, of course. In Conclave, a pope has died and cardinals have been summoned from around the world to Rome to choose a successor.

The challenge presented to the individuals involved, and to the actors playing the roles, is to corral the impulses of piety, faith, and devotion toward furthering the “cause” while suppressing the personal ambition that often simmers just below the surface. Without having seen the film, it might be difficult to imagine Stanley Tucci and John Lithgow as two of the main protagonists, but they acquit themselves well. Ralph Fiennes is even better playing the dean of the College of Cardinals, strapped with the responsibility of conducting the conclave while suffering doubts about his own faith all the while. The film is riddled with intrigue and suspense, but it also succeeds in sustaining the element of sanctity without which it might easily have descended into satire or farce.    

 The recent biopic about Bob Dylan’s early career, A Complete Unknown, is also a winner. The script is sharp, the acting is superb, the rendering of the folk music scene in the early 60s is rich (unlike the café scenes in Inside Lewin Davis, for example), and the music is emotionally affecting. And to top it all off, Timothy Chalamet succeeds in bringing an element of appropriately mumbling weirdness, mystery, shyness, and semi-naïve self-aggrandizement to the central character.

I remember those times, not in Greenwich Village but back here in good old Minnesota. I don’t think I ever bought a copy of Sing Out magazine, but I watched Hootenanny occasionally. (I preferred Shindig and Hullabaloo.) I spent my grade-school years listening to the Kingstone Trio, Ricky Nelson, and Peter, Paul, and Mary. When Pete Seeger came out with “Little Boxes,” my family was living in a tract home in Bartlesville, Oklahoma. I didn’t “get it.”

 In short, I tried to like folk music, but it didn’t take. Too predictable, too corny. At camp we sang “Blowin’ in the Wind” along with other tunes such as “500 Miles” and “Michael Row the Boat Ashore,” the playlist enlivened at intervals by “Kumbaya” and “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.” I preferred peppier numbers like “B-I-N-G-O” and “The Song of the Temperance Union,” which the camp director seemed to have a special fondness for.

In time, I bought a few Dylan LPs. The tunes I remember best are “Its All Over Now, Baby Blue” and “The Gates of Eden.” In the course of the film, Chalamet sings quite a few of the great ones, including “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright,” “It Ain’t Me, Babe,” “A Hard Rain’s A-Gunna Fall,” “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” and “Like a Rolling Stone.” And we get to hear quite a few verses. In the context of the film these songs come across as expressions of genuine personal emotion rather than timeless classics heavily laden with Dylanology. I teared up more than once.

Many critics have noted the factual elisions, discrepancies, and fabrications in the film, but it’s easy to see how they carry the action forward and focus our attention on the essential elements of Dylan’s development. He is a true original, but his sources of inspiration—Woody Guthrie, Johnny Cash, Pete Seeger, and others—are also front and center, along with Al Cooper and Mike Bloomfield, who helped him move on from the quaint world of traditional folk.

One of the films recurring themes is the struggle Dylan faced presenting himself to the world. He wanted to be famous, but he also wanted to be left alone, and the course he charted to sustain that effect left a lot of broken relationships in its wake. Director James Mangold’s achievement is to have rivetted our attention on the power of the music while leaving the questions about who Bob Dylan “really” was, or is, a pleasant mystery.

A half-century later, the "mystique" endures. Dylan himself recently offered a typically Dylanesque appraisal when he commented, before having seen the film, “Timmy's a brilliant actor so I'm sure he's going to be completely believable as me. Or a younger me. Or some other me."