They Don't Laugh Much, Either

Films: The Dead Don’t Die
Format: DVD from Byron Public Library through interlibrary loan on basement television.

When I found out that Jim Jarmusch was making a zombie apocalypse comedy, I was more than interested. I like a lot of Jarmusch’s work, and that’s evidently not something that a lot of people are willing to say. A lot of his films have been panned either critically or by the public or both, but a lot of his films really work for me. Naturally, The Dead Don’t Die was going to be of interest to me. This checks a lot of boxes for me.

Jarmusch called in a lot of favors here, or at least went back to a lot of people who he’s worked with in the past for roles of various sizes. The Dead Don’t Die was hardly a critical darling and was panned by the public as well, but you can’t fault the cast list. The cast includes Bill Murray, Tilda Swinton, Chloe Sevigny, Steve Buscemi, Danny Glover, Adam Driver, RZA, Carol Kane, Rosie Perez, Tom Waits, Selena Gomez, Caleb Landry Jones, and Iggy Pop. I don’t think all of those folks have worked with Jim Jarmusch in the past, but a lot of them have.

Off Script: Only Lovers Left Alive

Film: Only Lovers Left Alive
Format: DVDs from DeKalb Public Library on laptop.

I don’t know if Jim Jarmusch can be considered an acquired taste because I liked Jarmusch’s films from my first viewing of them. While I could probably rank his films in some order, every one that I have seen is one that I’ve liked. Only Lovers Left Alive is a film that I’ve wanted to see for some time, and it’s a film that makes me angry on a specific point. That it does says far more about me than it does about Jim Jarmusch or Only Lovers Left Alive.

In a very real sense, this is probably the least horror movie horror movie I’ve seen in a long time. It’s classified as such only because our two main characters and two of their main associates are vampires. We’re never actually told that they are vampires and that word appears nowhere in the film, but they have fangs, drink blood, can’t go out during the day, and appear to be undying. The film is not so much about them tracking down victims and killing them or about the tortured love between vampire and human victim, but about the endless toll of the years on them and their troubled and increasingly difficult existence in the modern world.

Prison Break

Film: Down by Law
Format: DVD from Northern Illinois University Founders Memorial Library on kick-ass portable DVD player.

A month or so ago I came out of the closet as a David Lynch appreciator. I’m not sure I’d call myself a fan, but I don’t mind watching his films. I’m going to do something similar right now—I like the films of Jim Jarmusch. Again, I’m not sure I’d call myself a dedicated fan, but I like what I’ve seen and I’d like to see more. There’s a cool aesthetic going on here, and I like what Jarmusch does with his limited budgets, his camera, and how he can make a mainly plotless film like Down by Law so worth watching.

Jarmusch’s work is probably less controversial than Lynch. People who don’t like Jarmusch can often see the artistic value in his work. In fact, I could well understand someone disliking Down by Law. For me, though, there was a certain expectation with this film. I remember seeing a promotional ad for it years ago and thinking I’d like to see it if only for the presence of Tom Waits. That was well over a decade ago, but I never saw the film until tonight.

Road to Nowhere

Film: Stranger than Paradise
Format: DVD from Rockford Public Library on kick-ass portable DVD player.

Since the first moment someone unconnected to a studio got access to a movie camera, indie cinema existed, or at least had the potential to exist. To the minds of many, though, indie cinema really started, or at least became something significant, when Jim Jarmusch made Stranger than Paradise, a virtually plotless piece of Americana that explores one of the great questions of any age: boredom.

We deal initially with Willie (John Lurie), who is formerly from Hungary and is actually named Bela. But he’s become fully Americanized and identifies as American, and doesn’t even really like to hear Hungarian being spoken. His aunt (Cecillia Stark) calls him to remind him of the arrival of his cousin, and that now, instead of her staying for a day or two at his New York apartment, she’ll be staying with him for 10 days.

The cousin is Eva (Eszter Balint), who is young and pretty, and completely unadjusted to life in the States. We also meet Willie’s friend Eddie (Richard Edson), who immediately finds Eva attractive, but who is essentially pushed away from her by Willie. Eva and Willie don’t like each other too much at first, but eventually grow to a level of acclimation with each other, particularly when Eva steals food and gives it to him. He reciprocates by buying her a dress that he likes (and she doesn’t) and by deliberately misteaching her American idioms. And then, the 10 days are up and Eva heads off to Cleveland.

A year later, after scamming a bunch of money in a poker game, Eddie and Willie borrow a car and go to visit Eva. What they discover is that life in Cleveland is just as boring as their lives in New York, and after a few days, they’re just as bored. Everything looks the same to them, and the television is exactly the same. So they decide to go somewhere really different, heading to Florida. But before they go, they “rescue” Eva from her job at a hot dog restaurant. And in Florida, everything changes, but remains strangely exactly the same for all three characters.

There are three parts to the film—New York, Cleveland, and Florida, and each one is about half an hour long. In each, we see variations of the same story. In its own way, it sort of presages a film like Lola Rennt, although without specifically repeating itself each time.

Jarmusch’s style in this film is interesting. He doesn’t ever cut from one scene to the next—each scene is a take of varying length followed by a second or two of a black screen. What this means is that the film feels choppy at first, but this rhythm soon becomes normal, and moving from one shot to the next feels natural.

It’s not much of a stretch to suggest that the fact that nothing really happens in this film until the last 15 minutes or so is entirely the point of the film. Our characters are aimless in the absolute meaning of the word—they have no direction. Even when they appear to have a direction, as when Willie and Eddie decide to go to Cleveland or to Florida, they aren’t going there with any specific reason in mind. Instead, it’s merely an excuse to get away from where they are and an attempt to get rid of the crushing boredom of their everyday lives. The fact that they are continually unsuccessful in this is also the point. Their lives have no direction, and no real meaning, and no real point.

Again, nothing really happens until the very end. At the end, we get all sorts of events at the same time, a complete opposite of what the first hour and change has been. That there is no plot for the bulk of the film is what makes it so compelling in its own way. At least that’s what makes it so important as an indie film. Jarmusch essentially took everything that we expect to see in a film—like a story that makes us want to keep watching—and did away with it completely. We’d get much the same story if the first hour were compressed into 10 minutes, and that would very much seem more palatable to many movie watchers.

Is it good? That’s a difficult call. I can understand the film’s importance, but I have a much harder time judging it on whether or not I’d want to see it again or really have much to do with it beyond what I have already. It’s certainly a noteworthy film and critical for understanding independent filmmaking…but ultimately it leaves me feeling unsatisfied.

EDIT: The more I think about this film, the more I see what Jarmusch was trying to do with it, and the more I appreciate it. There is a sense of disaffection in this film that is impossible to avoid, and that's sort of the point. Our characters want things handed to them, essentially, and no one hands them things (except at the end), and when it does happen, they manage to screw it up. You can see this same desire, lack of movement, and essential screwing up even more in today's world. So maybe I'm not so unsatisfied. Stranger than Paradise is a cinematic time bomb. A day later, I'm left pretty impressed.

Why to watch Stranger than Paradise: The birth of modern indie.
Why not to watch: Despite traveling across the country, it doesn’t really go anywhere.

Broken Arrow

Film: Dead Man
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on laptop.

I imagine that one of the great perks of being a respected artsy director is that you can get great people for itty bitty roles. Take, for example, Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man. Much of the cast beyond its main stars reads like an entry off a Who’s Who page. Robert Mitchum, John Hurt, Gabriel Byrne, Alfred Molina, Billy Bob Thornton, even weird ol’ Crispin Glover…most of whom have about five minutes of screen time. There’s got to be a real sense of satisfaction knowing that you can fill a small but critical role with essentially anyone you want for the part.

Dead Man has been dubbed an “acid Western,” combining the extravagance of the traditional spaghetti Western, the symbolism of classics, and the sensibilities of the counter-culture. I don’t know much about that, but I do know that it’s something to behold. It’s as divergent from the standard horse and six-gun picture as anything I’ve seen in the last year. In fact, had you asked me as recently as a week ago what Western I would call my favorite, I would have likely named films like Unforgiven and The Searchers. They’re still in the mix, certainly, but now, so is Dead Man.

Let’s take care of the plot quickly so that we can get to the fun stuff. A bespectacled accountant named William Blake (Johnny Depp) spends his life savings to travel from Cleveland to the town of Machine where he has been promised a job in the factory owned by a man named Dickinson (Robert Mitchum). However, once he gets to Machine, he discovers that the job has been filled, and Dickinson threatens him with a shotgun. Blake leaves and is taken in by Thel (Mili Avital), a former prostitute. Sadly, the arrival of Thel’s former lover Charlie (Gabriel Byrne) results in the deaths of both Charlie and Thel. Blake runs, not knowing that Charlie was the son of Dickinson, who has the money to cause Blake some real trouble.

In the exchange of gunfire with Charlie, Blake is injured, and now has a bullet lodged near his heart. He is discovered by a native named Nobody (Gary Farmer), who believes that Blake is the reincarnation of the poet William Blake. It is Nobody’s belief that this current Blake will create a different kind of poetry—one made of the blood of white men. This will be important, because Dickinson has put out a large bounty on Blake’s head and has sent three rabid killers after him. Of these, Johnny “The Kid” Pickett (Eugene Byrd) is the youngest and angriest, Conway Twill (Michael Wincott) is the most talkative, and Cole Wilson (Lance Henriksen) is the most terrifying. In fact, only Wilson will make the full journey. A known cannibal, he kills the others, and eats one of them.

What we get here is a very simple story told in a complex narrative. A man runs from a crime he committed out of self preservation and is forced to adapt to his new world and reality in order to survive as best he can, knowing that the wound he has sustained will kill him eventually. It is, therefore, not a quest for survival, but a quest for purpose and meaning before the inevitable end of his life.

And there are plenty of treasures on the way there. John Hurt appears for a few minutes as the assistant to the violent Dickinson. Alfred Molina appears at the end of the film as a racist trader. Iggy Pop and Billy Bob Thornton show up in between as two thirds of a group of insane trappers bent on doing something really not good to poor William Blake. Thornton is recognizable only from his voice, and Iggy Pop is certainly easy to spot despite the fact that he wears a dress and a bonnet. But the cameos do work because they are smart, and because they don’t really detract from anything on the screen. And, fortunately, the film really rests in the hands of Depp, Henriksen, and especially Gary Farmer, who is without question the best thing in the film—and for a film this good, that’s high praise.

What strikes me about this film as opposed to most other Westerns is the care with which the Native American question is addressed. In the early days of film, Native Americans were little more than savages frequently depicted as subhuman. As we moved into the more politically correct, enlightened, and white guilt-laden 90s, Native Americans became the complete opposite. They became magical beings of intense and deep wisdom, a noble race of people who lived in peace and harmony with the world until the balance was tipped by the marauding Europeans.

Dead Man does neither of these two things. It instead attempts to portray Nobody as a real person—neither a ridiculous savage nor an all-knowing font of spiritual and universal wisdom. Nobody’s past is filled with racism; he was captured and caged by English trappers, but was also pushed out of tribal society since his parents were from opposing tribes. While certainly knowledgeable and educated, Nobody’s wisdom is the wisdom of his own people and does not touch on the reality (really) of Blake’s world. In short, he’s a real person in a real world. He has a set of skills and a world of things that he does not understand.

All of this is greatly assisted by two tremendous artistic choices. First, Jarmusch shot the film in a rich, vibrant black and white, giving the film an older visual feel. The film truly loses nothing by not being in color, and gains a level of natural credibility for a Western. Second, the film was scored by Neil Young, who manages (as he frequently does) to blend both the modern, electronic age with the feel of the past and the prairie. Young’s music often evokes the feeling of anachronism, of ancient words and ideas in a modern context. Dead Man does the reverse, putting a modern story of spiritual survival and vision into the framework of the past. These two things juxtapose brilliantly.

Suffice to say that Dead Man now ranks as one of my favorite Westerns. This is a film I will watch again, and will likely enjoy more the next time through.

Why to watch Dead Man: A modern spiritual quest in old trappings.
Why not to watch: Cameo roles often leave me wanting more, with the exception of Crispin Glover.