**1/2 (out of ****)
Starring Bob Dylan, Jeff Bridges, John Goodman, Penelope Cruz, Jessica Lange, and Luke Wilson
Featuring cameos by Givoanni Ribisi, Angela Basset, Mickey Rourke, Steven Bauer, Cheech Marin, Christian Slater, Chris Penn, Fred Ward, and Val Kilmer
Directed by Larry Charles & written by Bob Dylan and Larry Charles (as Sergei Petrov and Rene Fontaine)
2003 PG13
Maybe Benedick said it best in “Much Ado About Nothing:” “there’s a double meaning to that.” There must be a double meaning to “Masked and Anonymous,” but I’ll be damned if I can figure out what it is. As we left the theatre, my wife turned to me and said “I hope this is like ‘Mulholland Drive,’ when I had no idea what in God’s name just happened and then you explained it all.” Alas, I was just as perplexed. The best I could do was say “I liked how 24 still images were projected each second to create the illusion of movement.”
Of course, I’m the last person in the world to negatively review a movie just because I didn’t understand it. But maybe there is no second level to “Masked and Anonymous.” Maybe it really is just a guy singing, intercut with images of people listening and nodding portentiously as if to say “these lyrics really make you think” or “heavy.” “Masked and Anonymous” is often pretentious, not unlike that hour-long Bon Jovi movie that came out on MTV a few years ago, in which a story was cobbled together out of the songs on one of his albums. That’s okay if you don’t remember it. No one else does.
Or maybe it’s that so much dialogue in “Masked and Anonymous” is clutter. I’m about to write a plot outline, and as it forms in my mind, some kind of meaning derived from the main plot points would not be particularly hard to decipher. Maybe the way people in this movie babble only needlessly obscures things. But we’ll talk about talk a little bit later.
The world has gone insane. Or at least moreso. The best part about “Masked and Anonymous” is the nameless country where it is set. The government is represented, on the streets, by machine gun-touting Africans in berets. When we meet the rebels, they seem to mostly be Asians with outdated rifles. When we see El Presidente, he has a distinctly South American flavor, in his white uniform with the high collar and telephone-sized chunk of medals. A Cuban cigar would look natural under his bushy moustache. Yet the cities look American, and Giovanni Ribisi does not bother to hide his New York accent when he talks about his “village.” Locations are spoken off as “the south” and “the mountains.”
The movie begins with a radio diatribe against believing in anything, and we are bombarded with images of a world that cannot trust any moral system whatsoever. The government cannot be trusted, the rebels cannot be trusted, neither can God, Allah, or anyone else. We see Penelope Cruz making the Sign of the Cross backwards in front of statues of every major deity. We see sleazy concert promoters lining up a benefit concert with the intention of selling hope as just another piece of merchandise. We hear Jeff Bridges intone that there’s no difference between a journalist and a novelist. His publisher agrees, urging him to just make whatever he writes interesting.
Into this quagmire steps the one musician hired to play at the benefit concert. Fresh from prison, his name is Jack Fate, and he’s played by the great singer-songwriter Bob Dylan. Based on “Masked and Anonymous,” there’s no way of telling if Dylan is a good actor or not. Certainly he has a great face for acting, and something of an actor’s presence. And maybe that’s all he needs. Jack Fate is a man so resigned and indifferent to his, well, fate, that when he speaks, which is seldom, it is only to deliver eliptical, dry witticisms in a flat monotone. Life has taught him, the hard way, to keep his opinions to himself, and, if he absolutely must let one slip out, to make it the most cryptic thing anyone has ever heard. Maybe this is a great portrayal of a man somewhere between broken and jaded. Maybe.
The sleaze (John Goodman and Jessica Lange) make no attempts to hide the concert’s mercenary intentions from Fate. Goodman goes on and on about how Fate’s career will be revitalized and the world will be saved. Fate asks “you don’t believe any of this, do you?” to which Goodman boisterously responds “of course not!” Meanwhile, nonstop vigils are held for the dying El Presidente, who may have a secret relationship with Fate. Fate knows the phone number for the presidential palace and eventually meets with El Presidente’s gravelly-voiced, long-haired successor (Mickey Rourke). Along the way, Fate’s only true friend is a former roadie (the always honorable and charismatic Luke Wilson). We also meet Jeff Bridges’ journalist-novelist, who subjects Fate to long-winded, senseless diatribes and calls it an “interview.” He inexplicably hates John Goodman, perhaps because they’re just carrying over the same hard feelings they had at the end of “The Big Lebowski.”
But this outline hardly does justice to the tone of “Masked and Anonymous’” conversations. Seldom has dialogue sounded so much like the liner notes from an album by, I dunno, those stuck-up alternative bands from the early 1990s like Belly and Porno for Pyros. Characters make speeches at each other more than talk, and they don’t seem to be picking up whatever point the previous pontificator was trying to make. But is mocking intellectualism the intent of the filmmakers?
Let’s see, symbolism…we got the musician beating a yellow journalist to death with a great man’s guitar. We got names: not just Jack Fate, but Tom Friend, Billy Cupid, Nina Victoria (Victory?), and Uncle Sweetheart. My wife speculates that the two hitmen out to collect a debt from Sweetheart are angels. Or demons. El Presidente’s successor is Edmond, while somewhere in all this is a character named Edgar, and Cheech Marin has one scene as a bench-sitter credited as Prospero. The two Eds are from “King Lear” while Prospero is “The Tempest;” does it mean anything, or is it simply a further embodiment of a jumbled world gone mad? If so, is the solution of “Masked and Anonymous” that, in these troubled times, we need to listen to the true and honest music of a guy who couldn’t enunciate to save his life? Or is the symbolic connect-the-dots that the sleaze represents crass consumerism while the yellow journalist represents the babbling, self-important-but-ultimately-meaningless pseudo-art of critics (like me)?
Page two of "Masked and Anonymous." Back to home.