JOHNNY DEPP IN THE OPENING TRAIN SEQUENCE OF JARMUSCH'S DEAD MAN'Dead Man' revisited"It is preferable not to travel with a dead man," says the Henri Michaux epigraph to Jim Jarmusch's 1995 film. Is it preferable not to watch the film again, having seen and been deeply impressed by it when it opened in America in 1996? Seeing it in Lincoln Center's retrospective makes its trippyness seem even trippier, its hallucinatory strangeness highlighted by the overlapping of memory with how it looks now, highlighting the best and worst of it. It still seems a brilliant vision, a dark masterpiece one would hardly have predicted from the director's first five films.
Dead Man is grander than them, and also set in the past. Its elements jar with each other: hallucinatory strangeness, crude, shocking, or gross moments all through; violence mocking gunslinger Westerns; dry jokes; poetry, ritual, myth. If Jarmusch even begins to fit all these together, he's staged one of the great coups of movies of the Nineties. One should begin by just unquestioningly savoring
Dead Man's rich strangeness. But eventually on re-watching one ought to be more qualified to say what it all means. But don't forget e.e. cummings' line, "A poem must not mean, but be."
On maybe the simplest level
Dead Man is a typical picaresque tale, depicting a meek young character who runs into trouble immediately, has adventures, and somehow survives throughout them -- because William Blake does actually survive for a remarkably long time, given that he is a dead man, from when Charlie Dickenson shoots him and kills his ex-girlfriend Thel Russell (Mili Avital). But William Blake's bad luck, going across the country on his last dollar after spending everything on his parents' funeral, then laughed at and expelled at gunpoint when he presents his letter guarantee of a job, is so black, the story right away is more Kafkaesque than picaresque.
Is it all a nightmare dream? It seems so right from that opening ride on the train, with William Blake of Cleveland (Johnny Depp, looking very young and naive; he will look Indian, slavic, and toughened at the end of things). Around him sit richly tricked out nineteenth century rural characters. Then there is the moment when men open the windows and fire away their rifles at buffalo, because it's government policy to have open season on them (like Indians). Then the train fireman, eyes popping out of his soot-darkened face (the preternaturally strange Crispen Glover) sits and talks to Blake, in his loud plaid suit, clutching his suitcase, wearing his shiny granny glasses. Glover talks dreamy nonsense. He's tripping. But the key words he utters are "hell" -- "What makes you come all the way out here. . . to
hell?" And "end of the line." "Machine," the town Blake thinks he's headed to for his job as bookkeeper for the Dickenson factory, is the "end of the line." The message is clear. He's a goner before the opening credits. This opening sequence alone, with its visionary interiors and interrupting tempo shots of wheels and the rising sound of train on track, makes this film classic. There is no other sequence quite like it on film. But, like the lovely transcendental opening of Von Trier's
Melancholia, it risks making the rest anticlimactic.
Dead Man is a long slow trip into death, like Thomas Man's
Death in Venice or Malcolm Lowry's
Under the Volcano. Like Hemingway's "Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" its milquetoast becomes brave, and a calm mensch, and then dies. Not surprisingly, there are bones everywhere, and when William Blake first walks into Machine he sees a wall full of skulls. When his spirit guide, Nobody (Gary Farmer) trips on peyote, he sees Blake's head turn into a white skull.
......
Is it an absurdist hipster romp? Some would say so. And it screams with mocking laughter, like John Hurt's when William Blake insists on going in to speak to the factory owner, Dickenson (Robert Mitchum).
Dead Man is, incidentally, a parade of tasty cameos. It's also striking to see how young some of the actors looked then, and how some (Depp) still look much the same and some (Hurt) looked gnarly even then. Most come and go fast. Even the three assassins Dickenson Senior hires to hunt down William Blake for killing his son Charlie (Gabriel Byrne) soon bump each other off or get bumped off. Hence Gary Farmer as Nobody becomes extremely important as the only character/actor (character actor) who runs through to the end, and if you don't like him, you won't like
Dead Man. Nobody is jokey, absurd, profound, unclassifiable, like the whole movie. The actor is a Canadian-born Native American, but he is nobody -- nobody's conventional idea of an Indian. He's very wise, but maybe he's a wise fool. It turns out he takes his ritual role as a guide to the mirror world quite seriously.
So then when Nobody brings the by now seriously wounded and clearly dying William Blake by canoe to the Northwest Indian coastal village to place him in a Ship of Death sturdy enough to carry him to the other world, there's no more joking. This may be why this passage is in some ways my least favorite, because by this time the film has gone on a little bit too long, its hypnotically slow pacing has begun to catch up with it (despite the energy provided by the throbbing, haunting rhythm of Neil Young's guitar, a musical motif that's one of
Dead Man's most defining elements). And there is something a little too gray about this last section, just as some of the earlier woods scenes are a little too dark. Let's not forget, though, that Jarmusch and his dp, Dutch Wim Wenders regular Robby Müller, are providing some of the freshest images of the Wild West we've ever seen, both avoiding and mocking cliché.
Maybe it's obvious why a lot of people never seem to "get" Jarmusch, if you can say
Dead Man is his "most conventional film," yet it's somehow such a mishmash of elements and tones you may need to be an aficionado to appreciate it. The Metacritic rating is 58%. "Come back, Jim Jarmusch. Come back to the pungency of your first films. Leave the 1970s. Come back to the future," wrote Stanley Kaufman in
The New Republic. And Stephen Holden of the
New York Times said "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." Maybe so, but note well that there are some important raves in Metacritic's list, one at the top from no less an authority than Jonathan Rosenbaum, who classified it in his review in
The Chicago Reader as a "masterpiece." But I became personally aware of Jarmusch's tricky status when I loved his recent
The Limits of Control (and called it the best thing he's done since
Dead Man), but could find only two or three favorable reviews of it.
Dead Man, 121 mins., debuted at Cannes in May 1995, when it was nominated for the Palme d'Or. It opened in US cinemas 10 May 1996, when this reviewer saw it at the Paris Theater on 57th Street in New York just back from a hallucinatory journey of his own. Screened for this review for the second time 18 years later as part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center's retrospective, Permanent Vacation: The Films of Jim Jarmusch, May 2-10, 2014. It shows Saturday, 5 April 2014 at 9:00pm, Sunday, 6 April at 1:15 pm, Wed. 9 April at 6:30 pm, and Thurs., 10 April at 3:45 pm. Shown with Jarmusch's music video for Neil Young's "Dead Man Score" (5 mins.).
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