Review of Masked and Anonymous (2003) by Tom S — 18 Aug 2004

Supposedly, every member of [i]Masked and Anonymous[/i]' star-studded cast took a pay cut for the chance to appear in a movie with Bob Dylan. Evidently none of them ever asked to see a script either, or someone might have noticed that very little about the film makes any sense whatsoever.

[i]Masked[/i] appears to be set in a dystopic parallel universe where the United States is a dictatorship sprawled over most of the North American continent and engulfed by the kind of rebel insurrection more typical of Latin America - but really, it's anybody's guess. Dylan plays Jack Fate, a character so similar to Dylan himself that he even has some of the same songs in his repertoire; at the same time, other characters discuss contemporaries of the real Dylan, like the Beatles and Jimi Hendrix. To add to the confusion, Fate is the son of the dying president.

The plot, such as it is, is at least pretty straightforward: Fate is sprung from prison by his manager (John Goodman) to play as the headlining act of a vaguely-described benefit concert. Beyond this rudimentary description, however, the film is near-completely baffling. People speak in truisms that would be rejected for inclusion in fortune cookies, and the fact that many of the actors - in particular Goodman, Jeff Bridges, and Val Kilmer - appear to have been given free reign to improvise makes it seem doubtful that even they know what they're saying or how it supposedly fits into the broader context.

Presumably this would be more of a problem if the film [i]had[/i] a context, but on the count of message, [i]Masked[/i] is as unclear as it is with anything else. Based solely on what transpires onscreen, it doesn't seem that the film sides with either the government or the rebels. If it's not going to do that, what was the point of depicting the conflict at all?

Director and co-writer (with Dylan) Larry Charles is a veteran of [i]Seinfeld[/i], which perhaps explains something, but here he takes the idea of a show about nothing to near-absurdist extremes and then reverses it. Where [i]Seinfeld[/i] found its humor in the recognizable human drama of the everyday, [i]Masked[/i] fails to make any connections to humanity in its forced depiction of the outlandish. Considering all the talent involved, [i]Masked[/i] is at least not very difficult to watch, but that minor concession is about the only praise it merits.