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Chase: Tangled up in Bob

No Direction Home: Bob Dylan, directed by Martin Scorsese, airs at 9 p.m. Monday and Tuesday on WEDU-Ch. 3 as part of Public Broadcasting Service's American Masters series. Chase's grade: Zzzzzz (okay, D); Sean's grade: A.

By CHASE SQUIRES
Published September 26, 2005

Bob Dylan looks into the camera and explains:

"I had ambitions to set out to find like an odyssey, going home somewhere. I set out to find this home that I'd left a while back, and I couldn't remember exactly where it was, but I was on my way there, and encountering what I encountered on the way was how I envisioned it all, in that I didn't have any ambition at all. . . . I was born very far from where I was supposed to be, so I'm on my way home."

Got that?

Unfortunately, that opening scene sums up Martin Scorsese's two-part, 207-minute (but feels much longer) film No Direction Home: Bob Dylan.

A better title: No Direction.

For devoted Dylan fans, maybe there's something worthwhile in there. Session musician Al Kooper, for example, tells viewers how he didn't know what he was doing (on keyboards) when Dylan recorded Like a Rolling Stone, but he jumped in anyway, uninvited, with an old organ and added those immortal notes. Or maybe it's the "previously unreleased" performance footage, the grainy black-and-white and primitive color video, and the interviews with a boozy, aging Liam Clancy.

For the rest of us, the channel, it is a changin'.

No Direction Home is like watching a slide show of someone else's vacation. The 64-year-old Dylan may have enjoyed opening the scrapbook for an adoring Scorsese. And it's apparent Scorsese had a great time assembling clips and interviews of old hippies. But it's just words and pictures, man.

Dylan and Scorsese go on at length, but say nothing.

For hours, Scorsese (Goodfellas, Gangs of New York) studies Dylan's career, mostly from 1961 to 1966, when Dylan was severely injured in a motorcycle crash. Without narration to tie clips together, the film relies on interviews, news conferences and concert footage (with the most interesting shots borrowed from D.A. Pennebaker's 1967 Dylan film Don't Look Back).

The chats in Joan Baez's kitchen (it's fun to see she's turned into Martha Stewart) are particularly dull. Not that Baez doesn't look to be a thoroughly pleasant neighbor, but like most pleasant neighbors, there isn't much insightful content there, just some chitchat.

Long, boring performances are punctuated by long, boring interviews.

"They were trying to build me up to be a topical songwriter. I was never a topical songwriter to begin with, whatever reason they were doing it was reasons that, they didn't really apply to me," Dylan says. "Words have their own meaning and have different meanings, and then words change their meaning. Words that meant something 10 years ago don't mean that now, they mean something else."

Two hundred and seven minutes is a long, long time for Dylan to insist that while those songs sounded like they contained a message, he really had nothing to say.

After 207 minutes, you believe him.

- Chase Squires can be reached at 727 893-8739 or squires@sptimes.com His blog is www.sptimes.com/blogs/tv

[Last modified September 24, 2005, 08:41:02]