Only Lovers Left Alive (Jim Jarmusch, 2013)

Tom Hiddleston and Tilda Swinton in Only Lovers Left Alive

Cast: Tilda Swinton, Tom Hiddleston, Anton Yelchin, Mia Wasikowska, John Hurt, Jeffrey Wright, Slimane Dazi. Screenplay: Jim Jarmusch, Marion Bessay. Cinematography: Yorick Le Saux. Production design: Marco Bittner Rosser. Film editing: Affonso Gonçalves. Music: Josef van Wissem.

With its focus on vital fluids, the vampire genre has always been about sex, especially since at the end of the sexually repressed Victorian era, Bram Stoker gave it one of its definitive expressions in Dracula, where the fear of sexuality gets turned into a fear of a living death. But with the fall of so many sexual taboos in the 20th and 21st century, vampirism itself no longer holds the same kind of terrors. It takes an imagination like Jim Jarmusch's to turn things around, to make the vampires afraid of the living. Only Lovers Left Alive is only partly a post-AIDS fable, in which the substance that sustains a vampire can itself prove deadly. Jarmusch's Adam (Tom Hiddleston) and Eve (Tilda Swinton) are age-old predators reduced in this century to procuring only carefully screened blood, uncontaminated by the misadventures of human beings. He gets his from a hospital researcher who calls himself "Dr. Watson" (Jeffrey Wright), she from an old friend, Christopher Marlowe (John Hurt), whose source we never discover. Jarmusch is casual about providing the backstories of his characters; we have to take them for who and what they are, with only tantalizing hints about their long past and even much of their present lives. We gather that this Marlowe is the historical one, who didn't really die in a tavern brawl in 1593, but lived on in exile where he ghost-wrote the plays of Shakespeare and at one point, presumably late in his life, since he is quite elderly when we see him, became a vampire and moved to Tangier. We never learn, either, why Adam and Eve have gone their separate ways after having been married at least three times in their so-called lives. She, too, lives in Morocco, but he has settled in a desolate, abandoned section of Detroit, where he spends his nights composing music and tinkering with electronics. The plot begins when she comes to visit and they are soon joined by her younger sister, Ava (Mia Wasikowska), an incorrigible troublemaker. But plot isn't much to the point in Jarmusch's film, which is a character study of two sophisticated people who have lived long enough to see the world and human beings (whom he calls "zombies") change around them. It can be said that some of the humor in the movie is a little obvious, sometimes more like a spoof of vampire pictures than the elegant setup of the film deserves. But this is, I think, one of Jarmusch's best films, simply because he has gathered a wonderful company of actors and given them a finely wrought atmosphere to perform in.

The Dead Don't Die (Jim Jarmusch, 2019)

Bill Murray and Adam Driver in The Dead Don't Die

Cast: Bill Murray, Adam Driver, Tom Waits, Chloë Sevigny, Steve Buscemi, Tilda Swinton, Eszter Balint, Danny Glover, Caleb Landry Jones, Larry Fessenden, Maya Delmont, Rosie Perez, Carol Kane, Iggy Pop, Selena Gomez, RZA. Screenplay: Jim Jarmusch. Cinematography: Frederick Elmes. Production design: Alex DiGerlando. Film editing: Affonso Gonçalves. Music: Sqürl.

I suppose that having made a vampire movie, Only Lovers Left Alive (2013), Jim Jarmusch may have felt he had to make a zombie movie, but I wish he hadn't. The Dead Don't Die might have become a cult film if there weren't so many good Jarmusch films to choose from: It has all the earmarks of a guilty pleasure movie, like cheeky dialogue and a trendy horror movie trope, the zombie apocalypse. And I have to admit that it's not as bad as most of the zombie fare, and that it's not even Jarmusch's worst film -- I'd have to rank it above The Limits of Control (2009) for that dubious distinction. But there's something dispirited about it, a feeling that having latched onto the idea for the movie, Jarmusch grew bored with it. That reflects itself in the gimmick that gradually creeps into the film: that the cops Cliff (Bill Murray) and Ronnie (Adam Driver) know they're in a movie. It first surfaces when the song "The Dead Don't Die" keeps reappearing on the radio and Ronnie refers to it as "the theme song." Then, in the middle of some byplay between the two of them, Cliff asks, "What, are we improvising here?" And eventually, after Ronnie says, "Oh man, this isn't gonna end well" one time too many, Cliff objects, and Ronnie admits that he's read the script. Cliff is incredulous: "Jim only gave me the scenes I appear in," he fumes. These "meta" moments are amusing, but they counter any involvement a viewer might have in the fates of the characters, predictable as the genre makes them. Still, I liked some things in the film, especially Tilda Swinton's eerie undertaker, who speaks with a Scottish accent and wields a mean samurai sword. I still think Jarmusch is a wonderful writer-director -- Paterson (2016) was clear evidence that he hasn't lost his touch -- when he's got the right subject in mind, but I think he needs to edit himself more, and not just make movies when an idea strikes his fancy.

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.

Paterson (Jim Jarmusch, 2016)

Adam Driver and Golshifteh Farahani in Paterson

Paterson: Adam Driver
Laura: Golshifteh Farahani
Doc: Barry Shabaka Henley
Donny: Rizwan Manji
Everett: William Jackson Harper
Marie: Chasten Harmon
Young Poet: Sterling Jerens
Method Man: Method Man
Japanese Poet: Masatoshi Nagase

Director: Jim Jarmusch
Screenplay: Jim Jarmusch
Poems by Ron Padgett
Cinematography: Frederick Elmes
Production design: Mark Friedberg

There have been lots of movies about poets. Some of them, like Jane Campion's 2009 film about John Keats, Bright Star, are even good. But when have we ever seen a movie about poetry, let alone one as good as Jim Jarmusch's Paterson? It's an homage of sorts to William Carlos Williams, who is perhaps the greatest claim to fame for the city of Paterson, N.J., and especially to his minimalist meditations on the quotidian: celebrations of things like refrigerated plums and white chickens beside a rain-glazed wheelbarrow. The protagonist of Paterson (which is also the title of Williams's not-so-minimalist long poem) is Paterson, a bus driver in Paterson.  He, too, writes poems about ordinary things such as Ohio Blue Tip matchboxes. His wife, Laura (who, as we are reminded, shares a name with the subject of Petrarch's sonnets), designs textiles with black-and-white patterns and longs to be a country-music singer and to start a cupcake business. They have a funny-clever-mischievous bulldog named Marvin. If all this sounds terribly cutesy, it doesn't feel that way while you're watching it. (No, I shouldn't speak for everyone. Let's just say it didn't feel that way for me.) It's kept grounded by Jarmusch's treatment of his characters, by a tinge of melancholy perhaps, or a sense that we're living in one of Jarmusch's urban constructs -- a Paterson of the imagination, like the Memphis or New Orleans or Cleveland Jarmusch imagined in his earlier films, places that look like the real thing but aren't. There are moments when Paterson gets sentimental, but it never gets mushy -- it gets Jarmuschy. It celebrates the poetic imagination that can find an emotional world in a familiar detail, as when Paterson, on one of his nighttime visits to the neighborhood bar, passes a laundromat where Method Man is composing a rap (or however you say it -- this is not my scene) to a beat provided by the slosh of a washing machine. The film would be nothing without surefooted direction, but it also benefits immeasurably from Driver's sensitive, funny performance and from the delicacy of the interplay between him and Golshifteh Farahani as Laura. Watch, for example, the way Paterson struggles not to offend Laura after she serves him a brussels-sprout-and-cheddar-cheese pie for dinner and tries to beguile him into a compliment on her creation. Nothing really terrible happens in Paterson: A gun is pulled in a bar by a frustrated lover, but it turns out to be a toy; some guys in a passing car warn Paterson, who is walking Marvin, that bulldogs are prime targets for dognapping, but it seems to be just a warning and not a threat; Paterson's bus breaks down, causing him an anxious moment because he feels responsible for his passengers, but help arrives. The big calamity of the film occurs near the end: Laura has constantly urged Paterson to make photocopies of the poems he keeps in manuscript in his notebook, but before he can do this, Marvin, who seems to be jealous of anything not centered on him (he growls whenever Paterson and Laura kiss), chews up the notebook. Paterson is dejected by the loss of the poems, but an encounter with a Japanese professor* who is visiting the city to pay homage to Williams reminds him that the poetic imagination is universal and indestructible. (It also helps that the professor gives Paterson a fresh notebook.)

*Played by Masatoshi Nagase, who was the young Japanese tourist in Jarmusch's Mystery Train (1989).

Watched on Amazon Prime

Dead Man (Jim Jarmusch, 1995)

Johnny Depp in Dead Man

William Blake: Johnny Depp
Nobody: Gary Farmer
Cole Wilson: Lance Henriksen
Conway Twill: Michael Wincott
Johnny "The Kid" Pickett: Eugene Byrd
John Scholfield: John Hurt
John Dickinson: Robert Mitchum
Salvatore "Sally" Jenko: Iggy Pop
Benmont Tench: Jared Harris
Big George Drakoulios: Billy Bob Thornton
Thel Russell: Mili Avital
Charlie Dickinson: Gabriel Byrne
Train Fireman: Crispin Glover
Trading Post Missionary: Alfred Molina

Director: Jim Jarmusch
Screenplay: Jim Jarmusch
Cinematography: Robby Müller
Production design: Bob Ziembicki
Music: Neil Young

It was probably inevitable that Jim Jarmusch and Johnny Depp, two of American film's best-known off-beat artists, would collaborate, and it seems appropriate that they should do it in that quintessentially off-beat American genre, the "stoner Western."* Unfortunately, for some viewers the film just feels stoned: slow, meandering, and fixated on images that refuse to yield up their significance. It is, I think, one of those films that are more involving to think about after watching them, which is why its reputation has grown since its initial release, when Roger Ebert, among other critics, dismissed it as "unrewarding." It opens with a long montage of young accountant William Blake's westward train journey from Cleveland to the end-of-the-line factory town called Machine, a name that suggests the real manifest destiny of the United States was the spread of industrial capitalism. Blake is on his way to a job with the Dickinson Metalworks in Machine, and is unaware that he shares a name with the poet and artist who was one of the great enemies of industrial capitalism. He dozes through spectacular scenery that has filled the great Westerns -- a reminder that before there were movies there were train windows. But when he arrives in Machine, no job is waiting for him, and his protests are futile when he demands to see Mr. Dickinson, who turns out to be the always-formidable Robert Mitchum in his last screen role. Moreover, that night he kills Dickinson's son in self-defense and, wounded himself, flees town on a stolen horse. Dickinson immediately hires a trio of gunmen to kill him. Blake is found half-dead from his wound by an Indian, who patches him up but also tells him that the bullet is lodged near his heart and he will die from it eventually. The Indian is called Nobody because he belongs to no tribe, having been abducted by white men as a child and taken to England to be exhibited. He was educated there and learned to love the art and poetry of William Blake, so naturally he proclaims the hapless accountant a reincarnation of the poet. And so Blake and Nobody begin an odyssey toward the Pacific, a picaresque in which Jarmusch manages to cross an adventure story with a satiric look at the failure of American ideals, using bits of Blake's prophetic verse as a running commentary. (Remarkably, quotations from Blake turn out to sound much like the kind of native wisdom usually ascribed to American Indians in the movies.) It's to Jarmusch's credit that this high-concept blend becomes as moving as it often is, especially, as I've suggested, in retrospect.

*Jarmusch referred to Dead Man as a "psychedelic Western," but aside from the scene in which Nobody, under the influence of peyote, sees the skull beneath William Blake's skin, it doesn't have the conventional distortions and hallucinations associated with movie psychedelia.

Watched on The Movie Channel

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.

Stranger Than Paradise (Jim Jarmusch, 1984)

Like a botanist discovering rare plants pushing through cracked pavement and a littered vacant lot, writer-director Jim Jarmusch finds curiously indomitable life forms in the back streets of ungentrified New York, the frozen outskirts of Cleveland, and the parts of coastal Florida that tourists speed through on their way to Orlando or Miami. And he presents them to us in a film with a beautifully eccentric rhythm to it. Stranger Than Paradise is composed of 67 single takes grouped into three sections: "The New World," in which Eva (Eszter Balint) arrives from Budapest to stay with her cousin Willie (John Lurie) in his ratty one-room New York apartment; "One Year Later," in which Willie and his friend Eddie (Richard Edson) drive to wintry Cleveland, where Eva has gone to live with her Aunt Lotte (Cecillia Stark); and "Paradise," in which Willie, Eddie, and Eva go to Florida. To say that nothing happens in the film isn't entirely incorrect, especially in the New York and Cleveland sections, in which Willie and Eddie spend most of their time playing cards, smoking, and generally getting on each other's nerves, as well as Eva's. In Florida, they lose money gambling, win it back, and Eva accidentally strikes it rich when she's mistaken for a drug runner's bagman. Yet it's the blackout structure of the film that gives it the illusion of a plot, or at least forward motion. Once you catch its rhythm, you may find yourself, as I did, eagerly anticipating the way in which Jarmusch will end each scene. He rarely does it with a gag or a punchline, but somehow in ways that make each scene feel like a kind of epiphany. In one of the longest sequences, we do nothing but watch the three major characters, plus Eva's boyfriend Billy (Danny Rosen), as they sit in a Cleveland theater watching a movie that, because it has no dialogue but is punctuated with various grunts, seems to be a kung fu film. Billy, who we learn has bought the tickets for everyone, is walled off from Eva by Eddie and Willie, who sit on either side of her, and when he passes the popcorn to Eva, Eddie takes a big handful. We learn more about these characters from this wordless sequence than we do from some of the film's expository dialogue. Tom DiCillo's black-and-white cinematography makes the most of the locations that were chosen for their blandness, bleakness, drabness, or, in the case of the frozen, snow-covered Lake Erie, emptiness. The soundtrack, composed for string quartet by Lurie, is supplemented by Screamin' Jay Hawkins's "I Put a Spell on You," a foreshadowing of Hawkins's appearance in Jarmusch's Mystery Train (1989).

Down by Law (Jim Jarmusch, 1986)

At the end of Jim Jarmusch's Mystery Train (1989), his young Japanese tourists set out for New Orleans, where the writer-director had been three years earlier to make Down by Law. As he did with Memphis for Mystery Train, Jarmusch imagined the city and wrote his screenplay before he ever set foot in New Orleans, and the resulting film is a kind of fleshing out of his imagination. Jarmusch's New Orleans is a construct of legend and myth, then, not to be taken literally any more than one would a fairy tale -- which is what Jarmusch has called Down by Law.  He imagines New Orleans as a city of musicians, prostitutes, and tourists, and he casts his three central characters in the mode of each: Tom Waits as Zack, an out-of-work disc jockey; John Lurie as Jack, a small-time pimp; and Roberto Benigni as Roberto, or Bob, an Italian wandering the city to soak up American idiom, which he dutifully writes down in his notebook. But if Jarmusch's New Orleans is an imaginary construct, it is grounded in a kind of visual reality, provided at the film's beginning by Robby Müller's camera as it roams the streets of the city, showing the signs of decay it exhibited even before Katrina. And the scenes that establish Zack and Jack are rooted in a sordid poverty, as Zack is kicked out of their apartment by his girlfriend, Laurette (Ellen Barkin), and Jack is lured into a trap in which he is arrested with an underage prostitute he has never met before. (Bob makes a kind of cameo appearance in a scene with Zack, thoroughly stoned and out on the street, who tells him to "buzz off" -- a phrase Bob records in his notebook.) After Zack is tricked into driving a car that has a body in the trunk, he joins Jack in the Orleans Parish Prison, where things look like they can't get any worse. But then Bob joins them in their cell, having been arrested for killing a man with a billiard ball in a pool hall fracas, and the film turns on a dime from a noirish study of the underclass into an off-beat comedy that, among other things, validated Benigni's Italian reputation as a comic genius. Here he's a catalyst, stirring Waits and Lurie into performances that raise their characters from sleazy to endearing. But the real star of the film for me is Müller, whose black-and-white cinematography also elevates the sordid into the beautiful. It becomes a film of textures, from the silken skin of a nude prostitute to the etched graffiti on a prison cell wall to the layer of duckweed on the surface of a bayou. In an interview, Müller has commented on how black-and-white has an effect of subtraction: Color gives you more information than you need, while black-and-white helps you concentrate on particulars. Down by Law has been criticized for its slowness, and Jarmusch certainly lets the tension slack a little, but even when there's nothing much going on, Müller's images keep the pulse of life steady.

Mystery Train (Jim Jarmusch, 1989)

Cinqué Lee and Screamin' Jay Hawkins in Mystery Train

Jun: Masatoshi Nagase
Mitsuko: Yuki Kodo
Night Clerk: Screamin' Jay Hawkins
Bell Boy: Cinqué Lee
Luisa: Nicoletta Braschi
Dee Dee: Elizabeth Bracco
Johnny: Joe Strummer
Will Robinson: Rick Aviles
Charlie the Barber: Steve Buscemi

Director: Jim Jarmusch
Screenplay: Jim Jarmusch
Cinematography: Robbie Müller
Production design: Dan Bishop
Film editing: Melody London
Music: John Lurie

I was born 40 miles from Tupelo, 75 miles from Memphis, and five years and nine months after Elvis Presley, but I grew up preferring the jazz-pop standards of Gershwin, Kern, Berlin, and Porter, and singers like Jo Stafford and Mel Tormé. It took me a number of years before I finally caught up with what was supposedly my generation, but eventually I succumbed to the myth of the King -- just in time to witness its deconstruction. That's partly what's going on in Jim Jarmusch's Mystery Train, a film that dragged me back to my own roots the moment I saw the City of New Orleans racing through a kudzu-shrouded railway cut. The myth is still so potent that it can draw young Japanese tourists from Yokohama to Memphis to visit Sun Records and Graceland, but also so porous that Jarmusch can peer through it -- like the ghost of Elvis that visits Luisa -- and glimpse some of the racial injustice that elevated Elvis to superstardom and left black musicians like Screamin' Jay Hawkins and Rufus Thomas (both of whom have roles in the film) struggling for recognition. If the film's three interlocking stories feel too much like a familiar contrivance, it's worth remembering that Mystery Train was made five years before Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino, 1994) and probably influenced it. The first segment, with the young tourists Jun and Mitsuko providing a decidedly original point of view on a country they view through the lens of rock 'n' roll, is the best. The middle one, in which the newly widowed Luisa drifts toward the same hotel where Jun and Mitsuko are staying and winds up sharing a room with the frenetic Dee Dee, is the weakest, particularly Luisa's ghost-sighting. The third section, with the wonderfully eccentric trio of Joe Strummer, Rick Aviles, and Steve Buscemi, ties everything together, but fortunately it doesn't do it so neatly that it feels phony. And the intermediary scenes with Hawkins as desk clerk and Cinqué Lee as bellhop keep everything in the skewed perspective that the film needs. Robby Müller's cinematography treats the characters in the film's three episodes as only transients through the city: He and Jarmusch often frame a scene, like the downtown buildings rising in the distance beyond vacant lots, and have the characters walk through the frame. The boarded-up storefronts and empty streets have an ironic permanence to them that the characters lack, so that the central character in Mystery Train is Memphis itself, seen here as bleak and grimy but still charged with some of the vital spark that gave rise to so much music. Jarmusch wrote the screenplay before he ever visited Memphis, but he found exactly what he anticipated there.