“Velvet Goldmine” (1998)
There are many reasons why Haynes’ fourth film to this day feels a little like his red-headed stepchild. Although boasting his biggest cast to date, it was the least well-received all around. It had an arduous journey, suffering the major setback of its thinly veiled inspiration David Bowie not just refusing to grant the rights to his songs (a bitter pill that Danny Boyle also recently had to swallow), but even suing the production over similarities to his life story, thereby necessitating months of rewrites (Haynes substituted classic glam-rock recordings from the likes of Brian Eno and remakes/remodels of Roxy Music tracks by members of Radiohead for the unavailable Bowie songs). And in an incident that at the time was not yet quite the cliché meme it is today, producer Harvey Weinstein wanted cuts. Haynes resisted as much as he could, but the relationship was damaged, and when, aside from Sandy Powell who picked up an Oscar nomination for the costumes, the film’s awards hopes seemed to recede after Cannes (where Haynes had received a prize for Best Artistic Contribution), Weinstein lost interest in promoting it and it tanked at the box office. According to friend and confederate Kelly Reichardt, the whole snafu “nearly killed” Haynes. All of this mythos means that “Velvet Goldmine” is precisely the kind of cocktail of misunderstood, mishandled and meddled-with that latter-day cult favorites are made of, and it certainly has been enjoying a renaissance in that regard, especially with a younger generation of viewers. But cultishness also thrives on imperfection, and at the very least “Velvet Goldmine” remains the least perfect of Haynes’ professional features —it has a jerkily elliptical structure that prevents a true connection with the characters. And that’s a strange complaint to level at so heartfelt and clearly personal a movie: yes, it’s a little bit art-school experiment in its “Citizen Kane“-mimicking format and chronological twitchiness, but it’s also a deeply felt love letter to the glam rock era and to the icons who embodied a proudly polymorphous sexuality at a time when such pride was unthinkable for mainstream society. Yet still now it feels like Haynes’ least disciplined work. The strong elements (like the cast —Jonathan Rhys Myers, Christian Bale and especially Toni Collette and Ewan MacGregor) and flights of imaginative fancy sometimes coalesce into a glimmering phantasmagoria of regret, nostalgia, sexual awakening, lust, ambition and jealousy (and for these moments alone it would be a rewarding watch), but at other times it feels grandiloquently pastichey, leaving the overriding impression of a montage in search of a movie.
“Far From Heaven” (2002)
If you were a viewer for whom all color films that feature old-timey cars and women in hats are essentially the same, you might see Haynes’ new film “Carol,” his HBO miniseries “Mildred Pierce” and this 2002 film as of a piece. But what’s most surprising about his take on classic Golden Age Hollywood melodrama is how many different textures he has found within a genre that, until its recent round of rehabilitation (for which Haynes is in large part responsible), was narrowly and often disparagingly defined. And his first time at this particular perfumed, powdered bat is simply sublime, a wholehearted embrace of the melodramatic tropes and aesthetic of a Douglas Sirk movie, but edged with a razorlike modernity in terms of the perspective it comes from. So “Far From Heaven”‘s story touches on class, race and sexuality in the stiflingly conformist 1950s, as the fragile veneer of picture perfect couple Cathy and Frank (Julianne Moore and Dennis Quaid) begins to crack under the pressure of Frank’s not-so-repressed homosexuality and Cathy’s growing attraction to their black gardener Raymond (Dennis Haysbert). But Haynes’ 21st century point of view allows him to twist the various knives much deeper, and to be explicit where often the films of the 1950s had to be allusive and almost coded in order to pass censors. As a result, “Far From Heaven” feels indelibly contemporary, even though it’s constructed for maximum nostalgia. It even boasts a slight archness, a very faint but unmistakable self-awareness that makes it feel like a story primarily, but also a commentary on that story, as well as a commentary on how those stories were traditionally told. This slightly self-conscious heightening of events in “Far From Heaven” is less in evidence in “Mildred Pierce” and arguably altogether absent from “Carol,” but it’s perhaps what makes sense of the film in terms of the progression of Hayne’s career and the evolution of his ideas. The glorious autumnal colorfulness of “Far From Heaven” (Haynes’ first film with genius collaborator Ed Lachman as DP, and his second with Sandy Powell doing costumes) still has elements of metatextuality and of an overtly outsider-y “queer” perspective that his earlier films had explored full-bore, but here he is beginning his project of co-opting (in spectacularly lush fashion) the language of classic Hollywood cinema to pursue his progressive agenda.
“I’m Not There” (2007)
Perhaps one of the reasons it’s difficult to fully embrace “Velvet Goldmine” now is that just under a decade later, Haynes turned in another breathtakingly experimental, semi-fictionalized, semi-fact-based impression of a musician’s legacy and the social and political change it fed off and fomented, and this time made an elusive but elegant masterpiece. “I’m Not There,” Haynes’ hyper-creative, wildly imaginative retelling of the “many lives” of Bob Dylan, literalizes his ongoing concern with self-created public images by seeing Dylan refracted into six different personalities. A couple are even based partially on other figures who were influences on Dylan, such as Woody Guthrie (Marcus Carl Franklin) and Arthur Rimbaud (Ben Whishaw), and alongside Jude (Cate Blanchett), who emblemizes mid-’60s Dylan-gone-electric, Jack (Christian Bale) as early ’60s Dylan-the-protest-singer, Billy (Richard Gere) aka Dylan as early ’70s Peckinpah-style Wild West outlaw and Robbie (Heath Ledger) the famous movies star who plays Dylan/Jack in a biopic-within-the-biopic, they provide the fragmentary impressions and images that Haynes collides together to form a whole that is part mosaic, part slo-mo explosion. It should be insufferable chaos, and indeed it is wilfully obscure and sometimes outlandishly indulgent. But it is also extraordinary, not least for the sense (unlike ‘Goldmine,’ again) that, as crazily as the film spools off into a hundred directions at once, it encompasses a coherent thematic whole. We may be left panting and dazzled by the effort of keeping up with the lightning switches between one mood and the next, and we may very well feel like at any time about 75% of the allusions and layers are lost on us, but the guiding sense of Haynes steering the film with absolute assurance and conviction makes it an immensely exhilarating experience. So while perhaps its most enduring contribution to pop culture is in the quite brilliant casting of a cross-dressing Blanchett as Jude (who not accidentally is the closest to actual real-life Dylan of all these proxies and whose dialogue is often made of direct quotes from interviews), “I’m Not There” overall is a feast not just for Dylan fans but for cinephiles too. After all, it provides about six different films in one and derives so much energy from its internal atomic collisions that it almost becomes a study in the nature of filmic collage. Ultimately, its formal brilliance resides in the fact that it is a biopic that exposes the lie of the biographical picture —the idea that one could ever capture a whole life in a single feature film. In fact, “I’m Not There” doesn’t just expose that lie, but glories in it and makes mind- and genre-expanding use of it.
