In brief remarks prior to the Wednesday-night premiere of its first-ever theatrical run, writer/director Matthew Mishory stressed that his Joshua Tree, 1951: A Portrait of James Dean is just that: a portrait. Mishory didn’t mention that every portrait is painted from a particular perspective. Considering that his Dean is 20 and—like a lot of 20-year-olds—self-important, self-centered, and self-involved (he himself admits near the film’s end that for the first 20 years of his life he never cared about anyone), it would explain a lot if Mishory’s intent is for Joshua Tree to be Dean’s internal self-portraiture, an impressionistic relating of what life might have felt like for him just prior to his meteoric rise to iconicity.
“One crowded glorious moment of life is worth more than an age without a name,” Dean (played broodingly by James Preston) says he wants carved on his tombstone. He can’t remember who said that, and he knows he’s flubbed it a bit, but he’s got the essence of Walter Scott’s maxim, and he’s trying to live it. Behind the camera, Mishory does well communicating this sentiment. Shot in lushly lo-fi black-and-white with flashes of grainy color and dubbed with a seemingly intentional minor incongruity, Joshua Tree sure feels like an effort to bring us into Dean’s internal world, where everything he experiences is somehow both a bit removed and vitally important, even the doldrums.
But does watching Dean lounge by the pool and talk with pretentious world-weariness (“I’ve done it all”) and disaffectedly listen to people talk about him (usually saying how bitchen he is) seem vitally important? Perhaps it depends on how fascinated you are with Dean when you walk into the theater. Similarly, is Dean’s homosexuality all that interesting? Mishory certainly treats us to heavy doses of it (two in particular will have homophobes running for the exits), but otherwise never does anything with the issue. From what’s onscreen you might be led to believe that being homosexual in 1951 is no big deal. Perhaps in certain tight Hollywood circles it wasn’t, but I suspect that the flesh-and-blood James Dean might have been more conflicted than Mishory’s cinematic creation, who couldn’t have an easier time of it were he living in 2012 Long Beach.
Because the film’s action ends just as Dean leaves for New York to enroll in the Actors Studio, Mishory doesn’t have much chance to show us Dean’s development as an actor—an area in which Dean deservedly fascinates, considering that he (along with Marlon Brando) was the pivot point for bringing realism to acting on the Silver Screen. We do get a couple of glimpses in scenes in a UCLA acting class, but if you’re more interested in Dean as actor than icon, your appetite is whetted but not sated.
I’m not sure whether we learn anything new from Joshua Tree, 1951: A Portrait of James Dean, and I don’t know that it matters either way. We certainly do get a portrait unlike any other we have of the man behind the most storied three-film career in history. Whether that portrait captivates you is—as with all portraits—in the eye of the beholder.
Joshua Tree, 1951: A Portrait of James Dean is playing at the Art Theatre of Long Beach (2025 E. 4th Street, LB 90804) for a one-week engagement. For info on show times call (562) 438-5435 or visit arttheatrelongbeach.com.