FEATURING: Amos Poe, Jim Jarmusch, Steve Buscemi, Lydia Lunch, Nick Zedd, Richard Kern, John Waters, Deborah Harry

PLOT: This documentary examines the “No Wave” and “Cinema of Transgression” film

movements and their connections to performance art and punk rock in New York City circa 1977-1985.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: It’s purely a supplemental feature for your weird movie education, giving background information on a significant underground DIY film movement.

COMMENTS: “It felt like our lives were movies,” says Debbie Harry early on in Blank City. “It was very cinematic.” Perhaps this explains Celine Danhier’s choice, which earned her criticism in some quarters, to place the focus more on the filmmakers than the films in this documentary. Based on the No Wave film clips which illustrate the story, this was the correct angle to take on the material. Most of the “greatest hits” Super-8 highlights consist of grungy hipsters smoking cigarettes in grainy black and white, or walking around dirty East Village streets in washed-out, home-movie color. By contrast, the Bohemian lifestyle the filmmakers fondly recall—sharing $50 apartments in burnt out tenements with cockroaches, shooting on the street on the spur of the moment whenever they could assemble a crew, sneaking into locations to film without permission or permits, and heading off to CBGB’s after a hard day of scraping together footage to drink and dance the night away while a pre-fame Blondie or Television played on stage—is a lot more interesting. The No Wave scene flourished during New York City’s downbeat phase, when the burg was deep in debt, full of abandoned buildings, and riddled by crime and heroin abuse (basically, the New York of Midnight Cowboy and Taxi Driver). The city in the late Seventies was nasty and dangerous, but for nouveau-beatnik types it offered cheap rent, cheaper Super-8 film stock, and the company of like-minded free spirits. Although it grew out of the ashes of the previous New York avant-garde exemplified by Andy Warhol and Jack (Flaming Creatures) Smith, movement godfather Amos Poe explains that this wave rebelled against the abstract experimentalism of the previous period, seeking instead a cinema based in realism, narrative, and political consciousness. The works emerging from this enterprise were (for the most part) grounded in the gritty reality of the streets. Filmmakers, graffiti artists and punk bands deliberately cross-fertilized ideas (John Lurie explains that “the painters were in bands, the musicians were making movies or painting, nobody did what they knew how to do.”) The resulting movies were amateur, improvisational, and based around dramatic scenarios that required no money (the most ambitious may have been James Nares’ Rome ’78, which located its story in ancient Rome using classical Gotham facades of museums, libraries and post offices as sets). When Reaganism rolled around and the economy rebounded, there was suddenly money available for funding filmmakers and artists, and success and sell-outs gutted the movement. Jean-Michel Basquiat, who used to use abandoned buildings as his canvases, became a darling of the art world. Susan Seidelman’s punk drama Smithereens (1982) made it all the way to Cannes, and within three years she was making a studio vehicle for Madonna. In 1984 Jim Jarmusch’s Stranger Than Paradise was another festival hit, and the No Wave was suddenly looking relatively mainstream. In reaction to the sudden respectability of the New York underground, in 1985 Nick Zedd, Richard Kern and Lydia Lunch launched a  more dangerous and nihilistic movement they dubbed “Cinema of Transgression.” Equally as amateur as their No Wave forebears, this counter-movement is more interesting (for our purposes, at least) due to their confrontational themes and weird textures. In The Wild World of Lydia Lunch (1983), Nick Zedd documented his breakup with Lunch, basically stalking the annoyed-looking goth beauty with his camera. The same director’s notorious and much-despised Geek Maggot Bingo (1983) features bizarre, Kuchar-esque tableaux: cardboard sets, cheap cyclops masks, and a cameo by horror host Zacherly. Kern’s Manhattan Love Suicides (1985) was a suite of blackly comic short films about obsessive love, each ending with a gruesome suicide. The Cinema of Transgression may not have produced any unquestionable masterpieces (or achieved much that John Waters hadn’t done before, and done better), but it did have the all-important sex, graphic violence, and obscenity charges necessary to garner an enduring infamy not shared by the tamer No Wave movies. All in all, Blank City is an interesting, nostalgic time capsule whose main function may be to inspire you to grab a couple of friends and a cheap camera and make your own movies that no one will ever see. Most of the films profiled here may not be worth the trouble of seeking out, but it sure looks like the artists had a blast making them.

Liquid Sky (1982), a very weird (it’s about aliens hooked on chemicals secreted by the human brain during orgasm) New York based film of the period, gets overlooked because it was made by No Wave outsiders, and because it parodied the New York punk art scene rather than celebrating it. Llik Your Idols (2007) was a lower-profile documentary with a many of the same talking heads, but focused almost entirely on the Cinema of Transgression.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The effect is something akin to having chaotically experimental work screened in the sterile white chambers of a modern-art museum, rather than, say, a bedsheet in the back of a squat basement or on a fifth-generation VHS dub. It makes for a certain head-snapping dissonance, but also a granting of respect to artists who have rarely received it.”–Chris Barsanti, Film Journal International (contemporaneous)

–William Blake, Gnomic Verses

DIRECTED BY: Jim Jarmusch

FEATURING: Johnny Depp, Gary Farmer, Lance Henriksen, Michael Wincott, Robert Mitchum, Crispin Glover, Iggy Pop, Billy Bob Thornton, Mili Avatal, Gabriel Byrne

PLOT: Mild-mannered accountant Bill Blake heads west to take a job as an accountant in the wild town of Machine, but when he arrives he discovers the position has been filled and he is stuck on the frontier with no money or prospects.  Blake becomes a wanted man after he kills the son of the town tycoon in self defense.  Wounded, he flees to the wilderness where he’s befriended by an Indian named Nobody, who believes he is the poet William Blake.

BACKGROUND:

• William Blake, the namesake of Johnny Depp’s character in Dead Man, was a poet, painter and mystic who lived from 1757 to 1827. Best known for Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, he is considered one of the forerunners of English Romanticism.
• Jarmusch wrote the script with Depp and Farmer in mind for the leads.
• Elements of the finished script of Dead Man reportedly bear a striking similarity to “Zebulon,” an unpublished screenplay by novelist/screenwriter Rudy (Glen and Randa, Two-Lane Blacktop) Wurlitzer, which Jarmusch had read and discussed filming with the author. Wurlitzer later reworked the script into the novel The Drop Edge of Yonder.
• Film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum coined the term “acid Western”—a category in which he also included The Shooting, Greaser’s Palace and El Topo—to describe Dead Man. Jarmusch himself called the film a “psychedelic Western.”
• Neil Young composed the harsh, starkly beautiful soundtrack by improvising on electric guitar while watching the final cut of the film.  The Dead Man soundtrack (buy) includes seven solo guitar tracks from Young, plus film dialogue and clips of Depp reciting William Blake’s poetry.
• Farmer speaks three Native American languages in the film: Blackfoot, Cree, and Makah (which he learned to speak phonetically).  None of the indigenous dialogue is subtitled.
• Jarmusch, who retains all the rights to his films, refused to make cuts to Dead Man requested by distributor Miramax; the director believed that the film was dumped on the market without sufficient promotion because of his reluctance to play along with the sudio.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: Nobody peering through William Blake’s skin to his bare skull during his peyote session?  Iggy Pop in a prairie dress?  Those are memorable moments, but in a movie inspired by poetry, it’s the scene of wounded William Blake, his face red with warpaint, curling up on the forest floor with a dead deer that’s the most poetically haunting.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Dead Man is a lyrical and hypnotic film, with a subtle but potent and

Original trailer for Dead Man

lingering weirdness that the viewer must tease out.  It’s possible to view the movie merely as a directionless, quirky indie Western; but that would be to miss out on the mystical, dreamlike tinge of this journey into death.

COMMENTS: Dead Man begins on a locomotive as a naif accountant is traveling from Cleveland to a the western town of Machine to begin a new life. We see him on the train playing solitaire or reading a booklet on beekeeping. He looks up to survey his fellow passengers, who meet his glance with indifference. The train’s whistle blows as the scene fades to black, accompanied by twanging chords from Neil Young’s guitar (sounding like abstract, electrified snippets stolen from a Morricone score). The scene repeats and fades back in again and again, each time with the traveler glancing around the compartment to find his companions slowly changing: their dress becomes more rustic, their hair more unkempt; females become rare, firearms common; the indifference in the passengers eyes changes into quiet hostility.

Dead Man is the story of an innocent who becomes a refugee after being caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. It’s a standard story, but the way Jarmusch tells it is strange indeed. This opening scene sets the rhythm for the movie: a series of slow pulses punctuated by fadeouts and anguished bursts from Young’s guitar, the setting slowly shifting from the civilized to the wild. With the continual fading out and fading back, it’s as if the movie itself is drifting in and out of consciousness; an appropriate motif, considering the protagonist is fatally wounded early on. The tale is a series of journeys: the journey to the wild west from the civilized east, Blake’s flight into the wilderness, his wanderings with his Indian companion Nobody in the forests of the Pacific northwest as he is hunted by bounty hunters, and his final canoe journey into the ocean. It’s also the journey of a man from innocence to experience and, more importantly, from life to death—or perhaps from death to afterlife.

Dead Man begs an allegorical reading, as powerfully as it resists one. Jarmusch sets up an obvious dichotomy between civilization and white men (generally bad) and nature and Indians (generally good) inside the mythic structure of a hero’s journey. The English poet and painter William Blake, who came out of the most “civilized” nation in the world but whose sensibility of mystical simplicity made him an outsider among his own people, is a bridge between the two worlds. The character William Blake, the accountant, whom Nobody insists is the dead poet, flees from white man’s civilization into the wild. With the aid of Nobody—himself is an outcast caught between the European and the native worlds—Blake is eventually accepted into the Indian culture, as he breaks with his own people by becoming “a killer of white men.” Ultimately, his destiny is to travel even farther west, father from civilization, all the way into the bosom of the Pacific.

That journey from corrupting complexity into peaceful simplicity is the basic structure of Blake’s voyage, and it obviously suggests a spiritual journey. The title suggests that the trip is a postmortem one. Although there is no reason to doubt the literal story—that Blake comes to Machine, is shot, meets Nobody as he is fleeing white man’s justice, then eventually dies from his wounds—it’s possible, and thematically reasonable, to consider the idea that Blake actually is dead through much of the movie. It’s easy to suspect that Blake dies the first time he is shot: Nobody, who accepts the impossible as obvious, suggests as much with his chilling words when he first meets Blake: “did you kill the white man who killed you?” It’s even possible to see Blake as a dead man from the first minute he steps foot on the train. The locomotive fireman with his coal-blackened face and prophetic pronouncements suggests that the accountant is traveling to is Hell. Although specific spiritual lessons are difficult to divine from the tale, Blake’s entire journey from Machine to the ocean could be seen as the voyage of a dead soul from the gates of Hell through Purgatory to Paradise.

The mainstream film fanatic will find those vague, mystical speculations of less interest than Dead Man‘s once-in-a-lifetime, multi-generational cast. The film is headlined by Johnny Depp in that thrilling post-heartthrob period where he was taking every risky and offbeat role that came his way—and nailing them all. Character actor Gary Farmer lands the role of a lifetime as crusty medicine man Nobody; crusty character actor Lance Henriksen, who always seemed like he was born to play a heavy in a Western, gets his chance here. Dependable Michael Wincott provides welcome comic relief. Quirky Crispin Glover adds another weirdo to his repertoire with his illiterate, portentous railroad employee, who may be the brakeman on Charon’s locomotive. Cadaverous non-actor Iggy Pop adds a touch of novelty as a frontiersman in drag. Rising stars Gabriel Byrne (as a forlorn lover) and Billy Bob Thornton (a year before Sling Blade) contribute small but memorable parts. The great John Hurt leaves us wanting more in his near cameo role as middle-management at the Machine concern. All of this remarkable assembly contributes something without anyone hogging the spotlight, but most of the publicity centered around septuagenarian superstar Robert Mitchum, who commanded the two scenes he appeared in as a frontier tycoon. Delivering iconic genre lines like “the only job you’re goin’ to get is pushing up daisies from a pine box!,” a role as a villainous patriarch in a Western seems like the perfect capper to Mitchum’s storied career. It wasn’t quite his final role, but it should have been.

Due to the crowd of interesting thespians, it would be tempting to consider Dead Man as an actor’s movie, but Jarmusch’s idiosyncratic direction overwhelms everything. As usual with this director, the technical qualities of the film are superlative. The high contrast black and white cinematography (courtesy of Robby Müller) captures the grime and decay of the city as well as the luminous beauty of a white birch forest, and Young’s guitar score is as spare and forlorn as the Pacific wilderness. Jarmusch’s method of fading in and out of scenes adds a dreamlike feel, and his deliberate pacing suits the majestic material this time around, coming across as more solemn than slow. This Western features the most languid shootouts ever committed to film; characters calmly aim and reload their guns without fanfare, or stand by fatalistically waiting to be gunned down. Although the lack of music cues, closeups and other methods of dramatically highlighting violence make for a realistic depiction of combat, the casualness of the technique is so unexpected in a genre picture that it creates an unreal aura. And, as expected, Jarmusch fills his canvas with some of the quirkiest, strangest characters you’d ever hope to see in an oater, including not only a trio of blackly comic foresters and the poetry-spouting Nobody, but also a loquacious bounty hunter who carries a teddy bear, and another who’s the worst kind of cannibal.

On it’s release, Dead Man received mostly negative reviews. It was criticized as too slow and too pretentious, appearing to be thoughtful but actually delivering no ideas worth mentioning. Time has been kind to the movie, however, which has emerged as Jarmusch’s best work to date. In Dead Man, a measured journey into an odd, somber, dark and funny wilderness of the spirit, Jarmusch created a myth with staying power. Filled with poetic images like Johnny Depp reclining with a slaughtered fawn, Dead Man has proven a mysterious power to linger in the memory. It may never yield up its meaning, but that doesn’t make it empty.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a strange, slow, unrewarding movie that provides us with more time to think about its meaning than with meaning.”–Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times (contemporaneous)

“…begins with a display of grotesquerie that is so sensational it sets up expectations that the movie might be the surreal last word on the Hollywood western and its mythic legacy. Those expectations, unfortunately, are not fulfilled. The film’s energy begins to flag after less than an hour, and as its pulse slackens it turns into a quirky allegory, punctuated with brilliant visionary flashes that partially redeem a philosophic ham-handedness.”–Stephen Holden, The New York Times (contemporaneous)

“A bizarre, funny, almost mystical take on the Western… an original and very weird account of the American wilderness.”–Geoff Anderson, Time Out Film Guide

OFFICIAL SITE:

Dead Man – An archived version of Miramax’s original 1995 Dead Man page, with stills, sound clips, and links (many no longer active) to information on the American West and William Blake

IMDB LINK: Dead Man (1995)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

Dead Man at “New York Trash” – A small but dense archive of Dead Man material, including cast bios, a short but very informative interview with Jarmusch, and movie and soundtrack clips

A Gun Up Your Ass: An Interview with Jim Jarmsuch – Dead Man champion Jonathan Rosenbaum’s detailed interview with Jarmusch for Cineaste magazine, conducted when the film was first released

The New Cult Canon: Dead Man – Scott Tobias initiates Dead Man into the A.V. Onion Club’s cult canon with a perceptive essay and two film clips

Critic’s Picks: ‘Dead Man’ – Video Library – The New York Times – Film critic A.O. Scott reassesses the “hallucinatory” Dead Man, calling it one of the best movies of the 1990s, in this three minute video review (Times critic Stephen Holden originally panned the film)

Blake & ‘Dead Man’ – A discussion of the film from a blog exploring the work of William Blake. Very insightful; it cites an earlier version of this review.

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

Dead Man – Johnathan Rosenbaum’s book length treatment of the film for the British Film Institute’s “Modern Classics” series, including a chapter on the “acid Western.”

DVD INFO: Miramax’s 2000 release (buy) offers up extras including cast and crew bios, a soundtrack-based music video from Neil Young, the theatrical trailer, and 16 minutes of unused footage. On April 12, 2011, Echo Bridge Home Entertainment released a bargain, bare-bones Dead Man DVD (buy) with no extras; the two cases look almost identical (confusingly, it’s the Echo Bridge release that features the Mirimax name on the cover), so customers should be careful to make sure they are getting the version they want. In the summer of 2011 Echo Bridge followed up the bargain DVD release with a bargain Blu-ray release (buy) which includes the special features from the original Miramax release. Considering that the Blu-ray costs only a couple more dollars than the DVD, it’s definitely the way to go if you have a player.
(This movie was nominated for review by “spalding,” who said “I always thought the film Dead man was a little strange and dark. the soundtrack was great, it was shot in black and white, and it had some odd moments.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

DIRECTED BY: Jim Jarmusch

FEATURING: Johnny Depp, Gary Farmer, Lance Henriksen, Michael Wincott, Robert Mitchum, Crispin Glover, Iggy Pop, Billy Bob Thornton, Mili Avatal, Gabriel Byrne

PLOT:  Mild-mannered accountant Bill Blake heads west, becomes a wanted man after he

shoots a man in self defense, and, wounded, flees to the wilderness where he’s befriended by an Indian named Nobody who believes he is the poet William Blake.

WHY IT’S ON THE BORDERLINE:  Dead Man is a lyrical and hypnotic film, and one that comes about as achingly close to making the List on the first pass as is possible.  The quality of the movie is no obstacle to its making the List, but the weirdness, while there, is subtle and must be teased out by the viewer.  There is a mystical and dreamlike tinge to Blake’s journey into death, but the strangeness is almost entirely tonal; Jarmusch’s artiness aside, it’s possible to view the movie as a rather straightforward, if quirky, indie Western.

COMMENTS:  Dead Man begins on a locomotive as a naif accountant is traveling from Cleveland to a the western town of Machine to begin a new life.  We see him on the train playing solitaire or reading a booklet on beekeeping.  He looks up to survey at his fellow passengers, who meet his glance with indifference.  The train’s whistle blows as the scene fades to black, accompanied by twanging chords from Neil Young’s guitar (sounding like abstract, electrified snippets stolen from a Morricone score).  The scene repeats and fades back in again and again, each time with the traveler glancing around the compartment to find his companions slowly changing: their dress becomes more rustic, their hair longer and more unkempt; female passengers become less frequent, firearms more common; the indifference in their eyes turns into quiet hostility.

Dead Man tells the story of an innocent who becomes a refugee after being caught in the wrong place at the wrong time.  It’s a standard story, but the way Jarmusch tells can be strange indeed.  This opening scene sets the rhythm for the movie: it proceeds in a series of slow pulses punctuated by fadeouts and anguished bursts from Young’s guitar, and it slowly shifts locale from the civilized to the wild.  The continual fading out and fading back in makes it seem like the movie is drifting in and out of consciousness; after it’s protagonist is fatally wounded, early on, this is a particularly appropriate motif.  The tale is a series of journeys: the journey to the wild west from the civilized east, Blake’s flight into the wilderness, his wanderings with his Indian companion Nobody in the forests of the Pacific northwest as he is hunted by bounty hunters, and his final canoe journey into the ocean.  It’s also the journey of a man from innocence to experience and, more importantly, from life to death, or perhaps from death to afterlife.

Dead Man begs an allegorical reading, as powerfully as it resists one.  Jarmusch sets up an obvious dichotomy between civilization and white men (generally bad) and nature and Indians (generally good) inside the mythic structure of a hero’s journey.  The English poet and painter William Blake, who came out of the most “civilized” nation in the world but whose sensibility of mystical simplicity made him an outsider among his own people, represents a sort of a bridge between the two worlds.  The character William Blake, the accountant, whom Nobody insists is the dead poet, flees from white man’s civilization into the wild.  With the aid of Nobody—himself is an outcast caught between the European and the native worlds—Blake is eventually accepted into the Indian culture, as he breaks with his own people by becoming “a killer of white men.”  Ultimately, his destiny is to travel even farther west, father from civilization, all the way into the bosom of the Pacific.

That journey from corrupting complexity into peaceful simplicity is the basic structure of Blake’s voyage, and it obviously suggests a spiritual journey.  The title suggests that the trip is a postmortem one.  Although there is no reason to doubt the literal story—that Blake comes to Machine, is shot, meets Nobody as he is fleeing white man’s justice, then eventually dies from his wounds—it’s possible, and thematically reasonable, to consider the idea that Blake is actually dead through much of the movie.  It’s easy to suspect that Blake dies the first time he is shot: Nobody, who often accepts the impossible as real, suggests as much with his chilling words when he first meets Blake: “did you kill the white man who killed you?”  It’s even possible to see Blake as a dead man from the first minute he steps foot on the train.  The locomotive fireman with his coal-blackened face and oddly prophetic pronouncements suggests that the town of Machine the accountant is traveling to is Hell.  Although specific spiritual lessons are difficult to divine from the tale, Blake’s entire journey from Machine to the ocean could be seen as the voyage of a dead soul from the gates of Hell through Purgatory to Paradise.

The mainstream film fanatic will find those vague, mystical speculations of less interest than Dead Man‘s once-in-a-lifetime, multi-generational cast.  The film is headlined by Johnny Depp in that thrilling post-heartthrob period where he was taking every risky and offbeat role that came his way—and nailing them all.  Character actor Gary Farmer lands the role of a lifetime as crusty medicine man Nobody; fellow character actor Lance Henriksen, who always seemed like he was born to play a heavy in a Western, gets his chance here.  Dependable Michael Wincott provides welcome comic relief.  Quirky Crispin Glover adds another weirdo to his repertoire with his illiterate, portentous railroad employee, who may be the brakeman on Charon’s locomotive.  Cadaverous non-actor Iggy Pop adds a touch of novelty as a frontiersman in drag.  Rising stars Gabriel Byrne (as a forlorn lover) and Billy Bob Thornton (a year before Sling Blade) contribute small but memorable parts.  The great John Hurt leaves us wanting more in his near cameo role as middle-management at the Machine concern.  All of this remarkable assembly contributes something without anyone hogging the spotlight, but the most of the publicity centered around septuagenarian superstar Robert Mitchum, who commanded the two scenes he appeared in as a frontier tycoon.   Delivering iconic genre lines like  “the only job you’re goin’ to get is pushing up daisies from a pine box!,” a role as a villainous patriarch in a Western seems like the perfect capper to Mitchum’s storied career.  It wasn’t quite his final role, but it should have been.

Due to the crowd of interesting thespians, it would be tempting to consider Dead Man as an actor’s movie, but, for better or worse, Jarmusch’s idiosyncratic direction overwhelms everything.  As usual with this director, the technical qualities of the film are superlative.  The high contrast black and white cinematography (courtesy of Robby Müller) captures the grime and decay of the city as well as the luminous beauty of a white birch forest, and Young’s guitar score is as spare and forlorn as the Pacific wilderness.  Jarmusch’s method of fading in and out of scenes adds a dreamlike feel, and his deliberate pacing suits the majestic material this time around, coming across as more solemn than slow.  This Western features the most languid shootouts ever committed to film; characters calmly aim and reload their guns without fanfare, or stand fatalistically waiting to be gunned down.  Although the lack of music cues, closeups and other methods of dramatically highlighting violence is probably a realistic depiction of combat, the casualness of the technique is so unexpected in a genre picture that it creates an almost unreal aura.  And, as expected, Jarmusch fills his canvas with some of the quirkiest, strangest characters you’d ever hope to see in an oater, including not only a trio of blackly comic foresters and the poetry-spouting Nobody, but also a loquacious bounty hunter who carries a teddy bear, and another one who’s the worst kind of cannibal.

On it’s release, Dead Man received mostly negative reviews.  It was criticized as too slow and too pretentious, appearing to be thoughtful but actually delivering no ideas worth mentioning.  Time has been kind to the movie, however, which has emerged as Jarmusch’s best work to date.  In Dead Man, a measured journey into an odd, somber, dark and funny wilderness of the spirot, Jarmusch created a myth with staying power.  Filled with poetic images like Johnny Depp reclining with a slaughtered fawn, Dead Man has proven a mysterious power to linger in the memory.  It may never yield up its meaning, but that doesn’t make it empty.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a strange, slow, unrewarding movie that provides us with more time to think about its meaning than with meaning.”–Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times (contemporaneous)

“…begins with a display of grotesquerie that is so sensational it sets up expectations that the movie might be the surreal last word on the Hollywood western and its mythic legacy.  Those expectations, unfortunately, are not fulfilled.  The film’s energy begins to flag after less than an hour, and as its pulse slackens it turns into a quirky allegory, punctuated with brilliant visionary flashes that partially redeem a philosophic ham-handedness.”–Stephen Holden, The New York Times (contemporaneous)

“A bizarre, funny, almost mystical take on the Western… an original and very weird account of the American wilderness.”–Geoff Anderson, Time Out Film Guide

DIRECTED BY: Jim Jarmusch

FEATURING: Isaach De Bankolé, Paz de la Huerta, Tilda Swinton, Bill Murray

PLOT: An enigmatic hitman is sent on an obscure mission to kill an unknown man for

unexplained reasons; the movie follows him as he meets with a long string of contacts of unclear significance, each of whom gives him a matchbook with further instructions and offers him a piece of dime store philosophy.

WHY IT’S ON THE BORDERLINE:  Set in an unreal moviescape of secret rendezvous and mystifying portents, The Limits of Control has definite shadings of weird.  It’s a bold experiment in pure cinema, and like most bold experiments, it’s partly successful and partly frustrating.  Stripping the plot down beneath its bare essentials, to the merest skeleton, Jarmusch proves that you can get pretty far on cinematic tone and technique alone.  He also proves that you can’t quite get all the way to a good movie solely through cinematics.

COMMENTS:  Dawn’s light breaks across the open eyes of a lone man lying in a hotel room bed.  He gets up, puts on a natty suit, and does tai chi exercises, measuring each move slowly and precisely.  He goes to a cafe, sits alone, and orders two espressos in two cups; he sends the order back when the waiter brings a double espresso in a single cup.  Night falls.  He returns to his hotel room, lies down on his hotel room bed, eyes wide open.  Time presumably passes.  Dawn’s light breaks across his unblinking face.  A new day has begun.

It’s a typical twenty-four hours in the life of the character known only as the Lone Man, a secret agent who spends most of his days walking around, looking at the Spanish scenery or visiting the modern art gallery, sitting alone quietly in a cafe sipping espresso, and staring off into space blankly.  He’s a quiet man, one who makes Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name look like a chatterbox.  He won’t say one word if zero words will get his point across.  Occasionally, another spy will meet him at a cafe and they will exchange matchbooks with further instructions.  The instructions tell him at what cafe to meet the next contact for another matchbook swap.

We don’t know the Lone Man’s mission, motive, employer, or adversary.   A naked woman he finds waiting in his hotel room one night (an alluring de la Huerta) livens things up.  He won’t have sex while he’s on the job, though, so for three nights she sleeps nude in his bed curled up against him while he lies there stoically, eyes wide open.  She reappears a couple more times as he travels from Madrid to Seville to a deserted villa in the Spanish desert.  A plot—well, really more just a collection of plot elements—eventually emerges.  The Lone Man spies helicopters circling about.  He sees another of his contacts abducted, moments after he has glimpsed her image, impossibly, on a film poster.  He eventually discovers his ultimate target in a remote bunker.

The molasses-slow style, with its hints of dramatic significance arising from the tiniest of cinematic cues, feels like something Jean-Luc Goddard might have made if he’d decided to film a thriller in the style of Sergio Leone.  The pace makes a Tarkovsky film look like a methamphetamine binge by comparison.  It’s to Jarmusch’s credit, though, that, for the most part, the movie is hypnotic rather than dull.  Christopher Doyle’s lush, brilliant cinematography helps immensely; he captures the Spanish cityscapes and landscapes with a painter’s eye for composition, and it can be a joy just to watch the Lone Man stalk across an arid plateau in his shimmering gray sports jacket.  The scary music by the experimental Japanese heavy metal band Boris, which alternates with quiet classical pieces, lends an ominous aura of coming doom.  Star De Bankolé has a genuine movie star presence that’s only amplified by his reticence.  He almost never changes expression throughout the two hour film; it becomes a momentous event when the briefest flicker of emotion plays across his tight-lipped, inscrutable face.

But mostly, the fact that the film isn’t completely insufferable is thanks to Jarmusch’s mastery of the language of movies.  He builds scenes not so much from thriller clichés as from deep motifs that have worked their way into our collective unconscious: the hero cocooned in solitude, the bafflingly complex conspiracy, the weight contained in a glance.  The Lone Man stares at a cubist painting of a violin.  The camera zooms in on his impassive face as dissonant guitar chords swell.  Back to a zoom of the painting.  Something significant has happened internally; we aren’t told what it is, but we’ve been trained to recognize it.  The Limits of Control is full of such moments; every instant of the film feels momentous, but we’re never quite let in on why.  That gives the film a kind of power and reveals Jarmusch’s unusual skill: the ability to create a sense of raw import without any context.

All this would have been even more mysterious and powerful, however, if Jarmusch hadn’t felt the need to pump this experiment in pure cinema full of a constant stream of meaningful-sounding, vaguely existential dialogue.  Every contact the Lone Man meets discourses on some abstruse philosophical point over coffee: one lectures him about the memories contained in musical instruments, another about the metaphysics of molecules, and John Hurt goes into the etymology of the term “Bohemian.”  It all feels very European—well, even more than that—it feels très European, n’est pas?  The Lone Man isn’t interested in any of their disquisitions on music, or art, or science, and neither is the audience—although we might have been if they weren’t pronounced in such pompous tones.  Even when the Lone Man reaches his intended victim, the target can’t keep his about-to-be-garroted yap shut without spouting a vague prophecy about the decadence of society, in a final speech cleverly constructed to appear to wrap everything up without actually answering anything at all.  Ironically, the script’s attempts to sound profound end up sucking the profundity out of the film.

“Reality is arbitrary,” responds an unusually verbose Lone Man as he prepares to finalize his mission.  Well, movie reality is arbitrary, at least; out here beyond the screen, people have actual motivations and real emotions and meaningful thoughts.  Jarmusch doesn’t appear have anything to say about the world outside the malleable movie reality he’s created.  In fact, the only time one of his characters says anything that doesn’t sound like total philosophical puffery is when Tilda Swinton’s character waxes rhapsodic about the power of cinema to transform the details of ordinary life into something magical.  These lines ring true because that’s what Jarmusch understands and believes in, and what he does well.  Next time, he should leave the philosophy to the philosophers and just focus on making a movie.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The Limits of Control is a shaggy dog story, but it’s leaner and less precious (and more beautiful) than the past few Jarmusch films…The Lone Man traverses the empty streets and barren landscapes of an abstract thriller, glimpsing previously met characters (or their images), engaging in mysterious transactions (a fistful of diamonds here, an earful of Schubert there), and trafficking in the free-floating symbols of a surrealist poem.”–J. Hoberman, The Village Voice