Word: renaldo
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Something happened over the last few years, the last few months. When we last remember leaving Dylan, it was amid no little confusion. History and myth, past hits and hints at new styles were tangled up in the touring Rolling Thunder Revue, the film Renaldo and Clara and the albums Desire and Hard Rain. Dylan was on shaky ground and knew it. The best moments of the period-the Revue and the concert footage in Renaldo and Clara-were a bow to the past, finding little support in Dylan's more recent work. The Revue, above all, indicated that...
...Last Waltz concludes with Dylan, and Scorsese photographs him better than Dylan photographed himself in Renaldo and Clara. But the real star of the film is Band Guitarist Robbie Robertson, whose ability to project charm and sex on-camera can be matched by only a few movie stars. Robertson is so mesmerizing that one can almost forgive him a self-martyring speech in which he attempts to link himself with every rock star who has ever met a tragic death...
...Nixon mask, which he pulls off. Dylan grins--the first of may shots of his incredibly bad teeth--but revealing...ah hah, this is art now mind you...masks within masks. You see, Dylan doesn't play Dylan in this film; corpulent Ronnie Hawkins does. Dylan plays Renaldo, a somewhat logical cross between the Jack of Hearts and the lone rider of "Romance in Durango"--"Hot chile peppers in the blistering sun/Dust in my face..." Sara Loundes Dylan plays Clara, while Ronnie Blakelee plays Mrs. Dylan, and Joan Baez is the Woman in White. Basically, this is the movie...
...Joan Baez manages to come out from under the weight of Dylan's cynicism with her dignity intact. There is one long scene--perhaps we could call it "Diamonds and Rust Comes to the Silver Screen"--in which Baez and Sara stage a tug of war over the bemused Renaldo. Sara is shown as a made-up 35-year-old housewife, a sort of pushy Zelda Sayre; it is hard to believe that Dylan could have written "Sad-eyed Ladies" for her, let alone describe her as "So easy to look at, so hard to define." The characters are stuck...
...show us only another in the unending series of masks he has worn since Huck Finn came down from the North Country with his Elvis Presley haircut. All this stuff about his tremendous egotism does not apply--as somebody else has already pointed out, what is art except egotism? Renaldo and Clara is just another step on the many roads of Bob Dylan. In the '60s, he came to prominence as the Voice of a Generation, as some publication like Time would bill him; by the early '70s, when he sang about George Jackson, he was less sure...