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Masked and Anonymous (2003) More at IMDbPro »

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91 comments in total

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38 out of 47 people found the following comment useful :-
Poetically creative, 8 October 2003
Author: jackfate00 from Ohio

I had read so many bad reviews of this movie. I'd read it was impossible to follow; I'd read that the dialogue was banal; Roger Ebert gave it half a star, claiming it was too ambiguous. So, when I saw Masked & Anonymous, I was prepared for the worse.

Instead, as soon as the movie began, and that Spanish Version of My Back Pages started playing to bomb explosions and imagery of a future gone wrong, I realize: I'm going to like this movie.

First, the plot, far too incredible to really explain here (And it sort of depends on your point of view anyways) is very creative in that it conveys an incredible amount of symbolism. On one hand, this is a movie that mocks rock music (Think of the scene where Uncle Sweetheart tells Fate "You're gonna play rock and roll get rich launch your career and bring world peace all at the same time!") On the other hand, this could be Dylan's way of telling us who he really is. "Maybe I'm just a singer and nothing more" he tells us. He's tired of being made to be a counter cultural liberal protester. He's tired of people who think he only writes anti-war songs. Think of the scene where a woman brings her daughter to see Dylan. When Dylan learns that the little girl knows all his lyrics he asks "What'd she do that for?" And the mother quickly responds "Because I made her." This movie is about so many things: You just have to see it and every time you see it again you'll see more.

Concerning the dialogue. Many people say the dialogue is contrived, banal, or mindlessly poetic. To such people I reccomend they read Shakespeare (He's in the alley). Dylan has been hailed as a modern Shakespeare, so it is not wonder that this movie has the same beautiful poetry that his songs do.

But I will grant this: Bad actors would never be able to pull off this script. And this was probably the movie's strongest feature: Incredible acting. John Goodman deserves an Emmy for his portrayal of the scheming Uncle Sweetheart. Val Kilmer shocked me with his ability to portray the crazed Animal Wrangler. Jessica Lange gave the best performance of her career. The list goes on... Mickey Rourke, Ed Harris, Christian Slater, all surprised me with brilliant acting.

If you have the chance to see this movie, just once, do so. And forgive its few shortcomings-- it was made on short notice, and its messages were meant to transcend all imperfections for movie rookie director Larry Charles. This movie will probably be forgotten one day, which is unfortunate, because rarely is a movie this original.

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46 out of 69 people found the following comment useful :-
Johnny's in the Basement, 22 January 2003
Author: Bill (baho@rmci.net) from Park City

What could go wrong with a movie that features Bob Dylan playing some fun tunes, leading actors John Goodman, Jessica Lange, Luke Wilson, Jeff Bridges and Penelope Cruz, and bit parts by Christian Slater, Ed Harris, Angela Basset, Mickey Rourke and Val Kilmer? Well, let's start with a script penned by Bob Dylan that is easily as ineffable as, say, Subterranean Homesick Blues. If you know why the man in the coonskin cap wants eleven dollar bills (and you only got ten) then maybe you understood this movie. The rest of us struggled with mundane dialogue, disjointed vignettes, thinly veiled allusions to Dylan's life, some sort of statement on revolution, and perhaps an admission by Dylan himself that even he doesn't have a clue as to what most of his songs mean. Maybe if I saw this film another 2-3 times I would unravel the deeper meaning, peel back the layers of symbolism, and better grasp the metaphors that give deeper significance to the movie. On the other hand, it's been 35 years and I still don't know why I should hang around an ink well or watch the parking meters.

I wish I could say that I enjoyed this movie. But the fact is, I rarely laughed, certainly didn't cry, and I didn't really care about any of the characters. I could barely follow the plot line. And I didn't understand most of what was lurking under the surface. None of the actors appeared to have clue as to what was going on either. But then, maybe that's what Dylan meant all along . Maybe, but you shouldn't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.

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23 out of 34 people found the following comment useful :-
Great Film And Even Better With A Shot Of Tequila!, 12 June 2004

Author: Cheetah-6 from Maui

Like one of Bob's epic songs, full of ambiguities, mystery, mind twisting meanings, implications and innuendos and then again maybe nothing real at all. Like a film of Desolation row, or Brownsville Girl this film conjures up all kinds of thought provoking images that don't lead anywhere specific but fascinate with what seems to be just below the surface. Whether or not it was the idea to make a film with as much intrigue about implied ideas and meanings without really being specific like what Bob Dylan so often does in his best songwriting; that's what has been accomplished here with far reaching success. This by far is the best Dylan on film that I have ever encountered and so refreshing to finally see Bob paint a masterpiece on film! This film also had me laughing at times more than any film I've seen in a long time. There are some truly hilarious scenes.

'Sometimes I think that new Dylan material should first be released underground to his most ardent fans. Because it's only them -- only the ones with haunted eyes and motorcycle minds, the electric men and the silver lightning girls -- who have the emotional vocabulary and derelict vision to faithfully interpret his material.'

'Bob Dylan has always articulated an alternative reality. To those who can relate to it, his songs sting and heal, lift and reveal.'

If Dylan's songs speak to you and get inside your psyche, see this movie, it will too! 10/10

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24 out of 39 people found the following comment useful :-
Dylan makes good, 16 September 2003
Author: mfacker from Portland, Oregon

There was a time when music mattered, and the people that made that music mattered too. Bob Dylan was one of those people. Dylan has floated in and out of the public eye over the years, but has made somewhat of a return with the release of his 2001 album Love and Theft. He has tried to increase his current comeback, and extend his hand into another form of art, by written and staring in a new film.

Masked and Anonymous is good no matter what your opinion of Bob Dylan may be. For Dylan fans this is a tour de force of film making. Written like a Dylan epic tune, think Desolation Row, Masked stays just out of reach of the explainable. Coupled with great cameos, Val Kilmer is far and away the best of many, Masked delivers. John Goodman and Jeff Bridges hold supply the majority of the nessecary acting with Luke Wilson helping out on occasion. However this is the Wilson of Old School, and a far cry from the Wilson of the Royla Tennebaums. None of that really matters, however, because this film was made for Bob Dylan, and he is the single most important character on screen.

In Jack Fate Dylan has created a chracter that personifies his style. Fate, an aging rock star returning home for a benefit concert, symbolizes what h as become of Dylan's career as a musician. Masked isn't really the story of Bob Dylan's life, no more then any of his songs are, it can be, however, his response to what his life has been like. The story itself lacks a little and the characters are never fully defined, but like the supporting acting none of that matters. The important part of Masked and Anonymous, and the only reason it was ever made, is Bob Dylan. Taken that way, Masked and Anonymous is a truly excellent, and original, piece of film.

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11 out of 16 people found the following comment useful :-
Ebert's Pain Is My Joy..., 5 September 2006

Author: Edward Rosenthal (eddiez61) from United States

The fact that Ebert is so turned off is a damn good clue as to what's so great about this "movie." Remember when Dylan went electric and p***ed off everyone, especially the old tyme die hard folkies? Folk singers were supposed to be the voice of acceptance, inclusion, democracy; but there was Pete Singer threatening to take an axe to the power cables to shut down Dylan's second set. Hypocrites. Bob's done it again with Masked and Anonymous, a fake pseudo mock parable set in a far off exotic land that's closer than we know. Its all done with a wink and a grin, and done very, very well.

Jessica Lange is absolutely amazing as an Industry Hustler, John Goodman is a riot and in the zone as a larger than life small time shmoozer. There's a crap load of supporting stars that just blaze in and out sight. Some you have to really squint to recognize, like Mickey Rourke. Giovanni Ribisi delivers a silver bullet monologue on the life of a rebel. Penelope Cruz has never ever been so watchable, her cute accent exploited to the max. Jeff Bridges is, well, Jeff Bridges. And Bob Dylan is OK. OK may not sound like much, but with this high power, super star, mega talent mix, he's lucky to not be totally squashed. Bob's smart enough to say as little as possible, and its a great contrast to all the uber-acting going on all around him.

Ever see one of those corny french philosophy lessons from the 60's that they call a film? This flick will help ya get over it.

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9 out of 13 people found the following comment useful :-
misunderstood, 7 June 2006
Author: billyparker from United States

I didn't like this movie when I first saw it, but after the third viewing I'm starting to get it. For one thing, it works as an explanation to Dylan's audience as to why he abandoned his "finger-pointing" political songs. And it has a lot of elevated-language aphoristic flourishes that work like great lines from Dylan songs. It also is pretty interesting as a prophecy of the outcome of our current illegal immigration situation--Mickey O'Rourke's character, who becomes President at the end of the film, points out to Dylan's character that when he first came to "this country, I was an illegal." This movie's pretty damn cool.

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9 out of 13 people found the following comment useful :-
Stay with it., 23 May 2006

Author: lafilm from United States

Get in the right frame of mind to watch this movie. Bob Dylan has a unique ability for understatement, while at the same time doing broad irony. Here he stays in character. At least he looks right at the camera. Like a Dylan song. Don't look for the standard movie structure. Much seems to be about the doing rather then the getting it done. It's great fun watching the characters. They never looked better then in this film. Bob always attracted the best backing group. And then there's the music. It's the songs that make little sense that really set the tone. Those who don't get it never will. While it's not Dylan's greatest moment, it still holds interest since it's born of his determination and the draw of his energy.

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5 out of 6 people found the following comment useful :-
Approach it like Duchamp's Orpheus, 11 August 2003

Author: Malcs from Seattle

For those who have read or heard the various reviews calling "Masked and Anonymous" a "mess" all I can say is if you enjoy the work of Bob Dylan you'll enjoy it, and if you don't enjoy his work, you probably won't enjoy it. It's that simple really.

It's a surreal social critique of the current state of things, as well as an attempt to illustrate to the audience not only what the world looks like to Bob Dylan, but also what Bob Dylan looks like to the world, much like his music. So if you are familiar with and enjoy that about his music, you'll enjoy the film.

And also, much like his music has always done, if you're up on your historical references and cultural detritus you'll find yourself giggling a lot. The puns and inside jokes are scattered everywhere, as are his songs, not necessarily performed by him.

Just let it soak over you like a long Dylan album and you'll know what I mean.

All the reviews are basically saying "It's not like how other movies are made these days. What is this crap?" In many ways it's similar to Renaldo & Clara, but it's much more mainstream than that ever was.

There's even a few seconds of the Seattle WTO riots in 99 in the film.

I think the best way to approach the film is as if you were watching a Duchamp. I could see it on a double bill with Orpheus. There's many allusions and references to other films like a pocketwatch with a broken face.

It's not a Hollywood film even though it's got a lot of Hollywood people in it. It's more like a very expensive foreign indie film. They all do great jobs, especially John Goodman, his character not being too far a stretch from his role in Barton Fink. But the characters are caricatures, archetypes, just like in Desolation Row it imagines what the future might be like, or maybe it just looks a little too clearly at what is happening right now.

From a straight acting perspective method would be wasted on these sketchy characters, because like in a noir film, you know them enough to know who they are and what they do, but their lives are all so repressed, their dreams are all of trying to comprehend the world they live in, where there is constant revolution, either dire poverty or obscene wealth and a lot of violence lies between the two, both physically and emotionally. Even the president of the television network has bodyguards with assault rifles. Other reviews all try saying that it takes place in some Central American country, but the irony is it was all filmed on the streets on the other side of LA.

Time is played with, sometimes to make someone get something right, and the parade of faces peopling the movie are the mythological icons of not just this age but stretching back past the 20th century. Ghandi, Pope John Paul II, Abraham Lincoln, Koo Koo The Bird Girl, they're all here. The characters all have names like Jack Fate, Uncle Sweetheart, Tom Friend, Bobby Cupid, Valentine, Prospero, Nestor, Bacchus. There's as many overriding themes as there are submotifs, but it's chockfull of details, too, and the details are fast and furious. You learn just to let one drop if you don't get it because another one will be coming up soon.

Many threads are pulled together and the plot is thought through as much as anything, but Dylan has always been more about questions than about answers, so traditional expectations of identifying with a simple plot and easily sympathetic characters won't leave you very nourished, as much as if you just accepted that, like life, anyone could say anything at any time which just might not be what you expected to hear.

So you can't see the framework that the plot is on very easily because the themes and questions asked are far more interesting and ultimately more overwhelming and therefore concentrated on more than the plot. The themes are big, the questions are huge, after all, this is Dylan. Mortality, desire, loyalty, purity, confession, nurturing, freedom, imprisonment, corruption, manipulation, poverty, madness.

The camerawork is impressive because a lot of the scenes have to do with who is more powerful than the other character, and overhead shots and shots up stairs really underline a lot of the relationships of the characters to their world, their friends and their enemies.

And of course, like a Dylan song, you could watch it over and over and find new things every time, even though you'll get most of it in one viewing. Some things you immediately realize what he just got away with. Who else could put Ed Harris in blackface and have him in a scene where he's looking down on Dylan from the top of a stairwell. Then the next time Dylan looks up he's changed to a young Rastafarian janitor.

When Dylan's character gets out of jail the first song you hear as he struts along with his suit and his guitar is an Italian rap remix of Like A Rolling Stone.

The center of the film is when a small black girl sings an amazing a capella version of The Times They Are A'Changin' to Dylan and his band while they're resting on the bandstand. It sends Dylan's character inward until he finally says "It's all just ordinary things" in one of the films very effective voiceovers. If you think of the film as a new album by Dylan, the voiceovers would be the liner notes he wrote himself. Another one closes the film, and when you hear what his last words are you realize that Dylan has basically just taken the same things he always addresses in his music, as well as the way he presents such things in his music, and has simply tried to do the exact same thing in a film. If you approach the film as a set of songs it will be easier to follow. The scenes are what are important, as well as who is who to the other person. The plot is controlled by the unpredictable events of the dictatorship in power and the dying king and who is the rightful heir.

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17 out of 30 people found the following comment useful :-
Only recommendable to hardcore Dylan fans, 25 April 2005

Author: Brandt Sponseller from New York City

Set in an unspecified war-torn country during an unspecified era, Masked and Anonymous weaves a number of threads around Uncle Sweetheart (John Goodman), a shady businessman/promoter, and Nina Veronica (Jessica Lange), a television producer. They're trying to raise money by putting on a "benefit concert", but because of their country's political quagmire, no stars will do the show. The best they can manage is Jack Fate (Bob Dylan), who is currently being held as a prisoner. The gig enables him to be released from jail and undertake a journey to the venue. We meet a cavalcade of quirky people along the way, most of whom say very quirky things, and just as the concert begins, the country's political situation worsens. What will happen to our cast?

Even though I'm a huge Dylan fan and Dylan is the focus of this film, I'm being very generous in giving Masked and Anonymous a 7 out of 10, which is only equivalent to the letter grade of "C" in my way of looking at ratings. If the film didn't feature Dylan and his music throughout, if there weren't a number of songs performed by Dylan and his band, I would probably have given Masked and Anonymous a 4 out of 10 (a high "F") or less. Understanding that, if you don't like Dylan's music, you should steer clear of this film.

That's a shame, because there are a number of interesting ideas in Masked and Anonymous. It has great potential, but the potential isn't developed at all. Any viewer giving the film a complete, coherent and favorable interpretation has put far too much time and energy into being an apologist--they've basically constructed an elaborate fiction for themselves ("Are they journalists or novelists" indeed). Because in the end, the film is just an incoherent mess anyway you slice it.

Under the most literal interpretation, Masked and Anonymous begins as a clever satire. The setting is a country overrun by a military dictator and various bands of rebels who have changed sides and causes so often they can't keep the factions straight. Initially, it seems like it might be a modern version of Woody Allen's Bananas (1971). Director/co-writer Larry Charles goes to great pains to keep the country anonymous. We're given visual clues that suggest a tropical nation, but in the next shot, it looks like we're in Detroit or some other Midwestern U.S. city. He uses an ethnic rainbow of extras, and the production design incorporates tokens from cultures around the world. On this literal level, Masked and Anonymous works fairly well until Dylan's first song performed on stage, at about the half hour to forty-minute mark. After this point, Charles, who co-wrote with Dylan, progressively abandons the interesting story. The focus becomes poetic but anachronistic dialogue and surrealistic "skits", almost exclusively set within the artificial environment of a large soundstage, and that seem like they arrived on a late train from another film. Charles also largely abandons the interesting cinematography and production design found early in the film.

On a less literal level, Masked and Anonymous can be viewed somewhere between a thinly veiled parable based on Dylan's actual life and a cinematic realization of a number of Dylan lyrics. Both ideas are excellent, but both would take much more work than this film evidences to pull off effectively.

A lot of dialogue isn't just thinly veiled as being about Dylan, it's not veiled at all. The character of Jack Fate often dissolves into nothing. Narration supposedly by Fate sounds like Dylan's poetry/lyrics, talking about his actual experiences in life. Characters ask Fate questions that I'm sure Dylan's fans have asked him at one point. And after all, Fate is just singing Dylan's songs, as Dylan does them when he's "playing himself". Dialogue that isn't so literally about Dylan, whether satirical or not (such as when Uncle Sweetheart points out that involved parties want him to play every big late 1960s band's music except his own), often makes references to his lyrics in some way or another. "A Simple Twist of Fate" becomes the name of the "Jack Fate cover band" that Dylan/Fate ends up playing with. The television schedule features programs that are names of Dylan songs, and so on.

But as either a parable about Dylan's life, with him busting out of his Minnesota "jail" and heading on a bus to another world, or as a weaving together of Dylan lyrics to make a story, Masked and Anonymous is far too loose to work. Dylan's lyrics have neither the "conceptual continuity" of Frank Zappa (Zappa's Uncle Meat concept is mentioned at one point as a precedent, and this might be why Goodman's character is Uncle Sweetheart) nor the surrealism of the later Beatles. On the other hand, Dylan has an awful lot of lyrics to choose from, so it's not that one couldn't construct an effective parable of his life (or some other plot) by threading together a number of lyrical references. It's just that one would have to do a lot more work to create a captivating film than Charles and Dylan do here.

The most generous reading of the film has it as a paradox--a deep, cryptic and mysterious means of telling us to not take Dylan as so deep, cryptic and mysterious. It's a bit disingenuous; especially when the film is often not as deep, cryptic or mysterious as it wants to be and it's a bit absurd to deny that Dylan is deep, cryptic or mysterious.

Charles also tends to waste his bloated cast--it seems that everyone was interested in having a cameo in a Dylan film (and who can blame them). Most of the cast does a fine job with the material they were given to work with, but it's both not enough and too much to save the film as a film rather than an inadequate concert video.

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5 out of 7 people found the following comment useful :-
Excruciating, 30 September 2004

Author: G-47 from NJ

From the first moments of this film, I felt like I had fallen down Alice's hole into a world of non-sensible idiots. What was this movie other than cheap pandering to Bob Dylan's enigmatic songs? Whose idea was it to make a movie that no one would understand let alone the actors that are crammed into it? Don't get me wrong. I like ensemble movies--seeing people who don't normally act together show up in unique situations is great. Usually.

But not in this movie. And the movie just kept going. I'm sorry to be ragging on it so much but for the first time in my life I seriously felt like walking out of the theater except my friends seemed to enjoy it. They actually wanted to talk about it after it was over. WHY? If you want a positive review--ask one of them. I just thought it was the "Bob Dylan and Friends" show, trying to pick apart the republicans running our country and just trying to hard to be witty. I don't want my money back. I want those 112 minutes back.

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