What do you think she meant when she said “a huge black monster with giant claws”?
Murray’s Don Johnston inhabits a series of Tauruses with a CD on the stereo that always starts on a different song, flying and driving around an indeterminate, possibly Northeastern region in search of past loves, past wrongs, and possible presents. Various forms of poverty, prosperity, love, death, and domesticity present themselves and are greeted by Murray’s character with the slightest of shrugs, smirks, frowns, stares, and tears.
I like David Edelstein’s comment in Slate that this film makes great use of Murray’s still amateurish acting abilities. This is a film about insufficiency on so many levels, a film not of hipster indifference, but of a certain effete inability to react. Murray’s face here embodies limitation and an unwillingness to change. On the other hand, the women of his past represent various permutations of Johnston’s (or Jarmusch’s) own American Nightmare, a small sampling of unappealing economic and social strata from somewhere out in the Great Sprawl. It is an odyssey parallel to that of William Blake’s great Western (mind) expansion in Dead Man, and one nearly as dire and unforgiving of the national landscape.
Ultimately, this is precisely the type of film that Jarmusch does best — and one that I have a very hard time commenting upon. It’s a grab-bag of archetypes tossed into a viper’s nest of free association, a combination so available for both social commentary and individual reflection that one could hardly call it “minimalist.”
by Leo Goldsmith | Source: Focus Features 35mm Print
18 Aug 2005 11:35 PM | Comments (1)
Eh, I don’t know as “minimalist” is the word I’d use to describe this film, especially given the way the audience is pounded over the head with Don Juan references, but I definitely entered the theater expecting a full-course meal and left feeling as though I’d only been given an appetizer. [Apologies for the lame analogy, but I have a head cold that is impairing my ability to write/think.] As with Alexander Payne, I sometimes get the sense that Jarmusch is intoxicated with his own (perceived) cleverness, which often results in a vague air of condescension seeping through to the characters in the film as well as the audience.
Beth
22 August 2005
8:33 AM
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