The Limits of Control (Jim Jarmusch, 2009)

Cast: Isaach De Bankolé, Alex Descas, Jean-François Stévenin, Óscar Jaenada, Luis Tosar, Paz de la Huerta, Tilda Swinton, Yûki Kudô, John Hurt, Gael García Bernal, Hiam Abbass, Bill Murray. Screenplay: Jim Jarmusch. Cinematography: Christopher Doyle. Production design: Eugenio Caballero. Film editing: Jay Rabinowitz.

The Limits of Control displays the limits of Jim Jarmusch's quirky minimalism. It's a story about an assassin (Isaach De Bankolé) who moves from place to place as he receives coded messages from various agents, zeroing in on his target (Bill Murray). The places are picturesque and nicely filmed by Christopher Doyle, and the agents are played in cameos by the likes of Tilda Swinton, John Hurt, and Gael García Bernal, which provides some interest to an otherwise rather plodding and repetitious movie.

Night on Earth (Jim Jarmusch, 1991)

Gena Rowlands and Winona Ryder in Night on Earth

Armin Mueller-Stahl and Giancarlo Esposito in Night on Earth

Béatrice Dalle and Isaach De Bankolé in Night on Earth

Paolo Bonicelli and Roberto Benigni in Night on Earth

Matti Pellonpäá in Night on Earth

Victoria Snelling: Gena Rowlands
Corky: Winona Ryder
Helmut Grokenberger: Armin Mueller-Stahl
YoYo: Giancarlo Esposito
Angela: Rosie Perez
Paris Cab Driver: Isaach De Bankolé
Blind Woman: Béatrice Dalle
Rome Cab Driver: Roberto Benigni
Priest: Paolo Bonacelli
Mika: Matti Pellonpää
Man No. 1: Kari Väänänen
Man No. 2: Sakari Kuosmanen
Man No. 3: Tomi Salmela

Director: Jim Jarmusch
Screenplay: Jim Jarmusch
Cinematography: Frederick Elmes
Film editing: Jay Rabinowitz
Music: Tom Waits

I guess people don't smoke in taxis anymore -- at least in tobacco-hostile America -- so Jim Jarmusch's Night on Earth probably evokes a kind of nostalgie de la boue in smokers or ex-smokers. Everyone lights up in the five segments of the movie, although Los Angeles resident Victoria Snelling at least chides her driver, Corky, for indulging the habit -- only to light up her own after Corky sarcastically refers to her as "Ma." Perhaps Victoria's advice crosses some kind of line between passenger and cabbie. In Rome, it will be the cabbie who crosses the line, persuading his priest-passenger to hear his taxicab confession, an experience that will bring about the priest's demise. In New York, passenger YoYo even becomes the cabbie, taking over the wheel from the incompetent driver, new immigrant Helmut Grokenberger. At least in Paris and Helsinki the old conventions remain, although Isaach De Bankolé's driver is infuriated at the liberties some of his passengers take with him, especially the well-to-do Africans who taunt him for his lowly Côte d'Ivoire origins. In Helskini there's a kind of working-class solidarity between Mika and his drunken passengers, one of whom has not only just been fired but has also learned that his daughter is pregnant and his wife has left him. What do all of these slices of life add up to? That's one of the charms of reflecting on an anthology film like Night on Earth, in which discrete segments seem to echo and enlarge one another. One of the reasons that taxicabs are so effective a setting for movies is that they can become crucibles for temporary relationships, moments out of time and space that seem more freighted with meaning than they really are -- Roberto Benigni's cabbie makes the resemblance of taxi to confessional booth part of his appeal to the priest. Put together five such moments, in five distinct cities, and you have something that looks like a statement about our common humanity. Although each segment neatly evokes the character of its particular city -- the glitz of LA, the grubby hopefulness of New York, the weary cosmopolitanism of Paris, the religion-steeped past and skeptical present of Rome, the chilly Cold War-haunted between-two-worlds quality of Helsinki -- the space and time inside their taxicabs seems oddly universal. That's what I love about Jarmusch's movies: Long after you've watched them, you're still savoring the details while bemused about the whole.

Coffee and Cigarettes (Jim Jarmusch, 2003)

Cast: Roberto Benigni, Steven Wright, Joie Lee, Cinqué Lee, Steve Buscemi, Iggy Pop, Tom Waits, Joseph Rigano, Vinny Vella, Vinny Vella Jr., Renee French, E.J. Rodriguez, Alex Descas, Isaach De Bankolé, Cate Blanchett, Michael Hogan, Jack White, Meg White, Alfred Molina, Steve Coogan, Katy Hansz, The GZA, RZA, Bill Murray, William Rice, Taylor Mead

Director: Jim Jarmusch
Screenplay: Jim Jarmusch
Cinematography: Tom DiCillo, Frederick Elmes, Ellen Kuras, Robby Müller
Production design: Dan Bishop, Mark Friedberg, Tom Jarmusch

For Jarmusch fans only. Coffee and Cigarettes, a collection of 11 black-and-white short films in which people sit at tables and drink coffee and smoke cigarettes, began as semi-improvisatory shorts spun off from Jarmusch's features by their crew and cast members and friends. Starting with Roberto Benigni and Steven Wright essentially winging it in "Strange to Meet You," the collection evolved from a series of shaggy-dog sketches into more structured narratives with a few motifs echoing throughout. The most structured is certainly "Cousins," in which Cate Blanchett plays two roles: the soigné movie star Cate and her blowsier cousin Shelly, who resents Cate's privileged life. They meet in the coffee shop of a luxury hotel, where Cate patiently endures Shelly's sniping until she's called away for an interview. Shelly has been smoking throughout their conversation, but when she lights up after Cate leaves, a waiter tells her that smoking is forbidden there. The episode "Cousins?" is a parallel story in which Alfred Molina and Steve Coogan, two British actors trying to make it in the States, meet for coffee, during which Molina reveals to a very unimpressed Coogan that he has done genealogical research which proves they are distant relations. After an excited fan asks for his autograph, Coogan becomes more and more condescending toward Molina. Then Molina receives a call on his cell phone from Spike Jonze, instantly deflating Coogan's ego to the point that Molina leaves him to pay the check. Amusing as these vignettes are, they don't rise much beyond the level of anecdotes, and some of the other episodes, such as the ones in which Jack White demonstrates his Tesla coil or Renee French fends off a too-attentive waiter, fall flat. Still, if you don't expect too much, there's an evanescent charm to the whole project.

Watched on Showtime

Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (Jim Jarmusch, 1999)

Forest Whitaker in Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai

Ghost Dog: Forest Whitaker
Louie: John Tormey
Raymond: Isaach De Bankolé
Pearline: Camille Winbush
Sonny Valerio: Cliff Gorman
Ray Vargo: Henry Silva
Louise Vargo: Tricia Vessey

Director: Jim Jarmusch
Screenplay: Jim Jarmusch
Cinematography: Robby Müller

Watched on Starz Encore Action

The gangster-as-samurai trope has perhaps been a little overworked ever since Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Samouraï, to which Jim Jarmusch pays homage at the end of Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai. It takes a filmmaker of special sensibilities like Jarmusch (or for that matter Melville) to make it work, to simultaneously explore and send up the notion that the hit man in service of a mobster is somehow the modern equivalent of the warrior in liege to a feudal lord. One reason Jarmusch's film works as well as it does is that he started with the actor, Forest Whitaker, around whom he wanted to build a film. Discovering Whitaker's interest in martial arts and reading the 18th-century Hagakure, a book on the warrior code, enabled Jarmusch to put things together. The result is a smart, funny, improbable but moving fantasia on old-fashioned themes like duty and honor. Big and bearlike -- bear references are key in the film -- but surprisingly graceful, Whitaker moves through the film with the kind of focus and centeredness you expect of a samurai. He's a master of nature -- his flock of pigeons -- and of technology -- his device that enables him to unlock doors, disable alarms, and start cars. He has a second sense with people -- his ability to communicate with Raymond, the Haitian who speaks no English while Ghost Dog (we never learn his given name) speaks no French. He has a rapport with children, especially Pearline, the bookish little girl who inherits his copy of the Hagakure and seems destined to follow his path. Once again, Jarmusch has taken a familiar milieu, the New Jersey mob land known to us from The Sopranos, and transformed it, the way he reimagined Cleveland and Florida in Stranger Than Paradise (1984), New Orleans in Down by Law (1986), and Memphis in Mystery Train (1989). It's not New Jersey, of course, though the film was shot there, but The Industrial State, which seems to be next door to The Highway State, as the license plates on cars tell us. Ghost Dog floats just outside of the real world, which makes it all the more real.