Ask Me No Questions!

JACK OF ARTS: Dylan (right) with John Goodman and Luke Wilson.

Masked and Anonymous proves as indecipherable as its star.

by Sam Adams

"The artist should be like God in creation … felt everywhere and seen nowhere." Since Bob Dylan and Larry Charles wonít admit to writing Masked and Anonymous -- pseudonymously credited to Sergei Petrov and Rene Fontaine -- weíll never know if they were considering Flaubertís oft-quoted epigram. But "everywhere and nowhere" is just where youíll find Dylan; he lurks around every bend, but as you turn the corner, heís vanished, leaving only dust motes shimmering in the sunlight.

Dylan is both literally present, as an actor, and absent, since he's playing a character named Jack Fate, a washed-up troubadour revered only by those who remember him. As Fate wanders through the dusty terrain of an unnamed country (patterned after a Central American banana republic, though shot in Los Angeles), he meets a succession of curious figures who could only have emerged from his mind, from a minstrel-show musician (Ed Harris, in blackface) who warns him of the importance of taking a stand, to an animal wrangler (a spectacularly filthy Val Kilmer) who tells him, "a crack at the bottom of a dry lake is worth more to me than any man." Replies Jack Fate, "I know what you mean."

If he does, he's the only one, but then there are many signs that Masked and Anonymous is less a story to be watched than a cryptogram to be decoded, or a koan to be pondered. What's with the "333" tattooed on Penélope Cruz's hand? The number of the beast, half-off? Are we really supposed to be able to follow the sputtering plot? And just as importantly, how come only half of the eight numbers performed in the movie by Dylan and his touring band ended up on the soundtrack?

Jack Fate, who's pulled out of an underground jail to headline a bogus benefit by the oily Uncle Sweetheart (John Goodman) isn't a literal transcription of Dylan -- for one thing, the singer's parched wit is totally absent -- but it's best to take most of the statements made about him (and indeed, those not about him) as reflections on his persona. Who else could be the intended target when Jessica Lange's harried producer demands to know if Fate's songs are going to be "recognizable," and Sweetheart responds, "Even when they're not recognizable, they're recognizable."

Jack Fate is, as it turns out, the son of the nation's terminally ill dictator. Torn as his name suggests between destiny and insignificance, he comes close to events, but doesn't seem to change them. The nation's power changes hands, virtually under his nose, and Fate seems not to notice, too busy rebuffing the advances of a wheedling reporter named Tom Friend (Jeff Bridges); murderous dictators are one thing, nosy journalists quite another. Dylan's well-documented distaste for the press (which goes almost as far back as he does) likely stems from the fact that their job is to clarify, while Dylan's is, if not the opposite, then something close to it. Goading him out of retirement, Friend's boss yells, "Are you a journalist, or are you a novelist?" "Same thing out there," Friend replies, but as with nearly every other line in the movie, it truly belongs to Dylan himself.

Masked and Anonymous

Directed by Larry Charles

A Sony Pictures Classics release

Opens Friday at Ritz East

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